software & applications
CONTAINER ORCHESTRATION : PUTTING TOGETHER THE CONTAINER PIECEs
Matthias Pfuetzner , senior solution architect , Account & Cloud – DA ( CH ) at Red Hat , explains why orchestration , not just containers , is the key to future enterprise applications .
Linux containers have become one of the most important buzzword bingo words and technology trends in the IT industry in the past several years , highlighted by the docker project and its practical and efficient way of packaging and transporting applications . But containers alone don ’ t have much value , if one cannot combine them in meaningful ways . They would be disjointed things in the factories , ports and harbours of enterprise IT .
In a way , it is a bit like a child ’ s play : an individual container is a building block , each a part on its own , with standard connectors to plug them together . Compared to working with plastic granulate and an extruder , it is much easier and faster to build new shapes and forms , to take them apart and to reassemble them differently . But for this pile of parts ( or code ) to become more than that , you somehow need to be able to construct or build something from these individual parts . Having the parts or pieces alone doesn ’ t really provide value and doesn ’ t even scale .
As the use of container technology has grown in the last several months , container orchestration has moved front and centre in the minds of IT and business pros . With the goal of enabling enterprises to deploy and operate their growing number of containerised workloads in a reliable and scalable way , container orchestration is a critical piece of the container puzzle .
What is container orchestration and why is it important ?
If containers in IT had not been so successful , and would only have been used for very specific and singular tasks , there never would have been a need to look at any technologies beyond running a handful of containers to accomplish niche tasks . But with the growing popularity and the accompanying focus on microservices led software architecture , it ’ s obvious that something is needed to harmonise processes from microservices ( which are very well suited to be packaged in containers ).
Orchestration in the context of Linux containers means the ability to define how containers talk to each other , how many instances of such containers are needed to provide given services , which containers need persistent storage and how access to the services inside the containers will be regulated , among other things . This can become a very complex and challenging task , especially if done at an individual container level . To abstract this complexity from average users , container orchestration tools , primarily in the form of platforms , have emerged , many of which have the side benefit of allowing containers to connect to other systems , applications and service offerings from a single control point .
28 | March 2017