Introducing the key concepts of orchestration

Running an application on a host may be complicated, but executing this same application on a distributed environment composed of multiple hosts would be very tedious. In this section, we will review some of the key concepts regarding the orchestration of application components, regardless of whether they are run using containers or as different virtual machines.

Orchestrators are special software components that help us manage the different interactions and dependencies between our application components. As you can imagine, if you divide your application into its many different functionalities, each with its own entity, orchestrating them together is key. We have to say here that some special functionalities, such as dependency management, may not be available in your orchestrator and therefore you will need to manage them by yourself. This gives rise to an important question: what do we need to know about orchestrators to prepare...