📄️ Overview
Orchestration refers to the automated management of service lifecycles in a distributed system—such as deploying, scaling, monitoring, and recovering application instances. In contrast to coordination, which focuses on how nodes within a cluster communicate and stay in sync, orchestration handles the infrastructure-level automation that ensures those nodes are running, healthy, and responsive under dynamic conditions.
📄️ Kubernetes
Kubernetes, often referred to as "K8s", is an open-source platform designed to automate the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. It orchestrates computing, networking, and storage infrastructure on behalf of user workloads. This means it handles the deployment of applications, maintains their desired state, scales them as needed, and manages updates and service discovery within the cluster. A Kubernetes cluster consists of at least one master node and multiple worker nodes that host the pods (the smallest deployable units that can be created, scheduled, and managed).
📄️ Docker Swarm
Docker Swarm is Docker’s native clustering and orchestration solution, allowing users to deploy and manage containers across a group of machines as a single, unified cluster. It provides built-in features for service discovery, load balancing, scaling, and fault tolerance, while maintaining a simple and familiar Docker CLI and Compose-based workflow.
📄️ Apache Mesos
Apache Mesos is a distributed systems kernel designed to abstract and pool resources—such as CPU, memory, storage, and network—across an entire datacenter or cloud environment. It enables efficient resource sharing across diverse workloads, making it well-suited for running large-scale, fault-tolerant distributed applications.