Containers provide users with an easy way to package and run their applications. Packaging involves defining the library and tools that are necessary for a user's application to run. These packages, once converted to images, can be used to create and run containers. These containers can be run anywhere, whether it's on developer laptops, QA systems, or production machines, without any change in environment. Docker and other container runtime tools provide the facility to manage the life cycle of such containers.

Using these tools, users can build and manage images, run containers, delete containers, and perform other container life cycle operations. But these tools can only manage one container on a single host. When we deploy our application on multiple containers and multiple hosts, we need some kind of automation tool. This type of automation is...

Docker Swarm is a native orchestration tool from Docker itself. It manages a pool of Docker hosts and turns them into a single virtual Docker host. Docker Swarm provides a standard Docker API to manage containers on the cluster. It's easy for users to move to Docker Swarm if they are already using Docker to manage their containers.

Docker Swarm follows a swap, plug, and play principle. This provides pluggable scheduling algorithms, a broad registry, and discovery backend support in the cluster. Users can use various scheduling algorithms and discovery backends as per their needs. The following diagram represents the Docker Swarm architecture:

The following sections explain the various...

Apache Mesos is an open source, fault-tolerant cluster manager. It manages a set of nodes called slaves and offers their available computing resources to frameworks. Frameworks take the resource availability from the master and launches the tasks on the slaves. Marathon is one such framework, which runs containerized applications on the Mesos cluster. Together, Mesos and Marathon become a container orchestration engine like Swarm or Kubernetes.

The following diagram represents the whole architecture:

Here is a list of Apache Mesos components:

Kubernetes is a container orchestration engine created by Google, designed to automate the deployment, scaling, and operating of containerized applications. It is one of the fastest developing COEs because it provides a reliable platform to build distributed applications on a massive scale. Kubernetes automates your application, manages its life cycle, and maintains and tracks resource allocation in a cluster of servers. It can run application containers on physical or virtual machine clusters.

It provides a unified API to deploy web applications, databases, and batch jobs. It comprises of a rich set of complex features:

• Auto-scaling
• Self-healing infrastructure
• Configuration and updating of batch jobs
• Service discovery and load balancing
• Application life cycle management
• Quota management

Kubernetes can run on various platforms, from laptops and VMs on a cloud provider to a rack of bare metal servers. There are multiple solutions today to install and run Kubernetes clusters. Read the Kubernetes documentation to find the best solution for your particular use case.

In this chapter, we will use kubeadm to bring up a Kubernetes cluster on Ubuntu 16.04+. kubeadm can be used to easily bring up a cluster with a single command per machine.

In this installation, we will use a tool called kubeadm, which is a part of Kubernetes. The prerequisites for installing kubeadm are:

• One or more machines running Ubuntu 16.04+
• Minimum of 1 GB or more of RAM per machine
• Full network connectivity between all machines in the cluster

All of the machines in the cluster need the following components to be installed:

1. Install Docker on all of the machines. As per...