Understanding container orchestration

The primary responsibility of Kubernetes is container orchestration. This means making sure that all the containers that execute various workloads are scheduled to run on physical or virtual machines. The containers must be packed efficiently and follow the constraints of the deployment environment and the cluster configuration. In addition, Kubernetes must keep an eye on all running containers and replace dead, unresponsive, or otherwise unhealthy containers. Kubernetes provides many more capabilities that you will learn about in the following chapters. In this section, the focus is on containers and their orchestration.

Physical machines, virtual machines, and containers

It all starts and ends with hardware. In order to run your workloads, you need some real hardware provisioned. That includes actual physical machines, with certain, compute capabilities (CPUs or cores), memory, and some local persistent storage (spinning disks or SSDs). In addition,...