Orchestration

This is my second post on Docker orchestration. In the first post, I demonstrated orchestrating Docker with Swarm, Machine, Compose and Consul. This post is to demonstrate orchestrating the same app with Kubernetes and draw comparisons between them. I recommend reading that post before this.

Introduction to Kubernetes

Kubernetes is an open-source system for automating deployment, operations, and scaling of containerized applications.

It groups containers that make up an application into logical units for easy management and discovery. Kubernetes builds upon a decade and a half of experience of running production workloads at Google, combined with best-of-breed ideas and practices from the community.

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With multi-host networking ready for production and the announcement of Swarm 1.0, I think it’s time to give Docker a serious try. This post details the steps I took to orchestrate a multi-host and multi-container app.

Architecture

This is a simple Node app that uses Redis as database, load balanced by Nginx. Each blue box is a Docker host, which runs several containers. All hosts talk to Consul for service discovery. The cluster has 5 nodes, each serves a specific purpose. We want to easily scale up and down the number of app containers.