Container Orchestration Tools Comparison Posted on : Jul 04 - 2022

This blog explains what container orchestration does, its benefits, and explores some of the available orchestration tools.

Containers have become increasingly popular as software development shifts from traditional methods to cloud-native development and DevOps.

In a containerized environment, a single instance of an operating system is shared across apps. For those more familiar with virtual machines, it’s useful to remember that each VM contains its own instance of a full operating system and is intended to operate as if it were a standalone server — hence the name.

Containers vs. VMs

Containers offer significant advantages over VMs, especially for cloud-native applications. As you can see, containers are lighter weight than VMs, so they utilize resources more efficiently. And because containers package together the necessary code, container runtime, tools, libraries, and settings, they are highly portable. A properly designed container can run on a developer’s laptop, on a data center server, or in a public cloud without modification.

Containerized applications typically decompose applications into separate services — microservices — each in its own container, and scale by running multiple instances of containers in parallel. (This helps make them resilient too.) As a result, you can have many more containers running at one time than you would VMs, and the lifespan of any given container instance is typically much shorter — minutes or hours. A running VM, by comparison, might persist for weeks or months.

This all adds up to some significant differences in the ways that containers must be managed. While you can start and stop containers manually, orchestration tools are required to manage containerized applications at scale. View More