Container orchestration is the process of automating the workload and efforts needed to run and deploy containerized services. Orchestration can be used to deploy the same containerized application in multiple environments without the need for a redesign.

Software teams use container orchestration to simplify their digital product life cycle and all the processes required to keep them operational.

See below to learn all about container orchestration technology and the global container orchestration market:

See more: Top Container Software Solutions

The container orchestration market was estimated at $379.5 million in 2020. It’s projected to maintain a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16.8% over the analysis period from 2020 to 2027, reaching $1.1 billion by the end of it.

The platform segment of the market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 16.2% and reach $598.1 million by 2027. The services segment of the market is forecast to maintain a CAGR of 17.5% over the analysis period.

Regionally, the container orchestration market is segmented as follows:

By industry , the IT and telecommunications industries are expected to drive demand in the container orchestration market.

See more: The Containerization Market

Container orchestration solutions provide a reliable and flexible framework for provisioning, deploying, networking, and managing containers at a scale.

Due to their lightweight and small size, containers are often used in bulk, especially in large organizations that rely on them for operations and application deployment. While a relatively small number of containers can be deployed and managed manually, the more containers there are, the harder it is to manage them adequately without the help of automation software.

“Application containerization enables us to break large applications into smaller pieces and package them into containers, a process that can be orchestrated by Kubernetes,” says Vince Marino, a member of the Forbes Technology Council.

“It facilitates deploying and running applications without launching and managing virtual machines (VMs) software.”

Research by IBM in 2020 into the enterprise adoption of containers found that 70% of software developers using containers also utilize an orchestration solution, with the majority of them relying on cloud-managed orchestration services. 

Some key features that you can expect to find in orchestration solutions include:

Orchestration tools enable you to automate the deployment of upgrade and update packages to containers with minimum downtime. It also simplifies the process by standardizing the configuration and variables.

Orchestration platforms automate the resource allocation processes between containers based on microservice or application. Automatic resource allocation can help manage the demand and availability of each container.

Orchestration tools continuously collect and store log data from containers to use for health checks of the container’s services. The performance and deployment of the container are constantly monitored to ensure it’s meeting set standards of operation.

Service discovery through orchestration platforms enables containers to connect with and discover one another on the network with minimal configuration efforts. It also controls the exposure of one or more containers to the internet and the IP address associated with it.

Container orchestration tools intervene when traffic flowing to a container spikes over the recommended amount. They distribute the traffic across other containers in the network in order to maintain the performance and stability of the service. 

Security for containers relies primarily on access privileges for who is able to run containerization commands with little to no restrictions. Getting the automation by container orchestration settled early on in the build allows for better container security and access.

“Containers and container orchestration are powerful tools to help scale and automate application deployments, but they require careful consideration from a security standpoint,” says Rory McCune in a post at Micro Focus’ TechBeacon.

“Getting the controls early in your container journey will make it much smoother and reduce the risk of attackers using your scalable command execution environment against you.”

See more: Top Container Security Tools

Some of the key benefits of container orchestration solutions include:

See how container orchestration solutions are used by organizations in different industries:

Babylon Health is an online artificial intelligence (AI)-powered platform for patient diagnostics. Launched in the U.K., it helps patients obtain appointments with their health care providers through the app within as little as 30 minutes.

As a machine learning (ML)- and AI-powered solution, Babylon relies heavily on in-house computing power. However, after the company expanded, this was no longer an option.

Babylon decided to migrate its user-facing app to Kubernetes container orchestration. 

“Kubernetes is a great platform for machine learning, because it comes with all the scheduling and scalability that you need,” says Jérémie Vallée, AI infrastructure lead, Babylon.

“We wanted to make this platform portable, so that we can run training jobs anywhere. Kubernetes offered a base layer that allows you to deploy the platform outside of the cloud provider and then deploy whatever tooling you need. That was a very good selling point for us.”

Switching to Kubernetes, Babylon was able to cut computing time from “hours or days” to instantly and reduce the time required for clinical validation from 10 hours to under 20 minutes.

userwerk is an online marketing company and a point of purchase provider for e-commerce stores. Based in Germany, userwerk converts its clients’ inactive traffic into revenue while offering customers a positive exit experience.

Working with many fast-paced retailers, userwerk needed an infrastructure to support its performance criteria that’s both scalable and reliably available. Working with Google Cloud and its implementation partner, Claranet, userwerk switched to the cloud and started using container orchestration and management.

“We founded userwerk to bring competition into a monopolized market. The challenge was to be agile and get the platform up and running as quickly as possible as well as create a really great user experience for customers, with a highly available, scalable architecture,” says Markus Kalb, founder and CEO, userwerk.

“One of the big advantages of Google Kubernetes Engine is the ability to scale up instantly. For example, when one of our retail partners doubled its traffic, our infrastructure handled it without any issues.”

By implementing Google Kubernetes Engine and switching to Google Cloud, userwerk was able to maintain a 99.993% uptime and achieve a response time of 15 milliseconds.

Ahamove provides on-demand logistics services for delivery truck drivers to connect with customers. Based in Vietnam, the app works with 50,000 drivers and has an average monthly user base of 300,000.

Operating cloud-based containerized workloads, Ahamove was facing limitations with customization and scalability. Looking for more control over its container clusters, it started running its microservices infrastructure on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) to manage container orchestration on the AWS Elastic Cloud.

“We decided to centralize as much of our technology as possible on the AWS Cloud. AWS does a great job of integrating native compute, storage, and data services with automated third-party tools, and there’s a lot of support from the AWS team as well as the wider engineering community,” says Ngon Pham, CEO, Ahamove.

“Stability is guaranteed on AWS, and we’ve greatly reduced our infrastructure risk since migrating to Amazon EKS.”

With Amazon EKS, Ahamove was able to maintain an uptime of 99% or higher, provide real-time GPS for its drivers, and automate its scaling.

Some of the leading providers of container orchestration services in the market include:

See more: Top Container Registry Software

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