Fundamentals of Container Orchestration

So far, we have learned what software containers are, how they work, and how to create them. We focused on using them, as developers, to create our applications and distribute functionalities into different components running in containers. This chapter will introduce you to a whole new perspective. We will learn how our applications run in production using containers. We will also introduce the concept of container orchestrators and cover what they can deliver and the key improvements we need to include in our applications to run them in a distributed cluster-wide fashion.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Introducing the key concepts of orchestration
• Understanding stateless and stateful applications
• Exploring container orchestrators

We will then go on to study how to leverage Docker Swarm and Kubernetes orchestrators’ features in Chapter 7, Orchestrating with Swarm, and Chapter 8, Deploying...