What is Container Orchestration

In the simplest of terms, container orchestration is the automated process of deploying, managing, scaling and networking containers. Containers are lightweight, portable self contained units that include an application or the processes needed to run applications. Docker is a great example of a project that helps to containerize or package applications, and was a large reason why containers gained such popularity around 2013. Before Docker there were Linux Containers (LXC).

Container orchestration is extremely useful for teams who need to run many applications that are each made up of many containers. Without proper orchestration, scaling and management of applications can quickly turn into chaos, outages and security events.

Benefits of Container Orchestration:

There are numerous reasons why many teams look to adopt a container orchestration process, including:

• Scalability - Containers allow for easy portability and duplication of instances that can easily be scaled up or down based on load or need.
• High Availability - Duplicated instances can help to keep applications running despite failures.
• Efficiency - High density models are better suited for containers, allowing for better utilization of underlying infrastructure, whether running bare metal or cloud.
• Portability - You get the same units to test and move across test, dev, and prod environments.
• Consistency - Repeatable processes and automated operations across all environments.

Container Orchestration Platforms

Kubernetes

The de facto standard Kubernetes, is very well known at this point. Initially created by engineers at Google back in 2014, popularity exploded over the subsequent 10 years. Kubernetes is an open source project widely adopted by organizations of all sizes. Whether or not kubernetes is the right choice for every organization is a question for another blog.

Kubernetes is a container orchestration platform that can help manage containers at large scale that necessitate complex architecture and processes. While it's incredibly powerful it comes with its drawbacks. Constant updates and the multitude of dependencies that most clusters rely on make Kubernetes very complex and tough to manage. Due to the pure size and expertise needed to make a successful and long lasting Kubernetes deployment, it constantly leaves companies in search of Kubernetes alternatives.

Cycle.io

Cycle is a LowOps container orchestration and infrastructure management platform. Back in 2015 when we started our goal was to be one of the best Kubernetes Alternatives on the market, we wanted to be really good at container orchestration. Fast forward to today and we have evolved into a compute platform, a place to manage all infrastructure regardless of if it's cloud, bare metal or on prem and orchestrate all of your container, vm or function workloads on top. For the sake of this blog we will focus on the container orchestration aspect of the platform.

Cycle provides engineering teams with an easy to use out of the box container orchestration solution. All you have to do is bring your container images and the underlying compute and Cycle will do the rest. It's as straight forward as:

• Build - Import image from container
• Deploy - Deploy container
• Manage - Cycle's platform takes care of runtime, resource limits, backup, and more
• Scale - Adjust container capacity based on load
• Monitor - Track performance, health, and usage

There are certainly various ways to orchestrate containers, some are more complex than others, Cycle likes to give power to its users while making a complicated process easier.

Choosing the right Container Solution

A multitude of factors should come into play when choosing your container orchestration solution. Teams with deep technical expertise and applications with large scale and complexity should have less trouble adopting a container solution like Kubernetes. But regardless of team size or expertise, you should ask yourself, are we delivering a better product because we are using Kubernetes? If the answer is anything other than 100% yes, look at other options.

Kubernetes alternatives are vast and many. Cycle is a great option for teams small or large, building complex or simple applications and products. We are great for teams that don't need Kubernetes or a managed solution that is similar, and want to make good tech and rely on container orchestration that just works.

Other solutions are up to your discretion, but key indicators of what is the best platform for you should be team size, expertise, application complexity, infrastructure, monitoring needs and of course cost.

Conclusion

Container Orchestration is extremely helpful for teams looking for an automated way to manage, scale and network together various applications. There are many options when looking for a container orchestration solution, most people gravitate to Kubernetes out of popularity but there are great options for Kubernetes alternatives. If you diagnose your team's goals properly the right solution will be pretty apparent. Our suggestion is to fully vet out what works for your team and ask questions about Day 2 operations. Our team is here to help if Cycle sounds like a good container orchestration platform for you.

💡 Interested in trying the Cycle platform? Create your account today! Want to drop in and have a chat with the Cycle team? We'd love to have you join our public Cycle Slack community!