Overview
Orchestration refers to the automated management of service lifecycles in a distributed system: deploying, scaling, monitoring, and recovering application instances. In contrast to coordination, which concerns how nodes within a cluster communicate and stay in sync, orchestration handles the infrastructure-level automation that keeps those nodes running, healthy, and responsive under dynamic conditions.
Kubernetes
Kubernetes deployments of Stalwart are driven by a Helm chart that installs the server as a StatefulSet, exposes the standard mail listeners (SMTP, submission, IMAP, POP3, ManageSieve) alongside the HTTP management listener, and provisions persistent storage for the data volume. The StatefulSet shape is used (rather than a plain Deployment) so that each replica keeps a stable hostname and its own PersistentVolumeClaim, which matters when the DataStore (found in the WebUI under Settings › Storage › Data Store) is a local backend such as RocksDB and when the cluster's node-id lease depends on a stable hostname.
Docker Swarm
Docker Swarm is the native clustering and orchestration solution from Docker. It deploys and manages containers across a group of machines as a single cluster, providing built-in features for service discovery, load balancing, scaling, and fault tolerance while preserving the familiar Docker CLI and Compose workflow.
Apache Mesos
Apache Mesos is a distributed systems kernel that abstracts and pools resources (CPU, memory, storage, and network) across a data centre or cloud environment. It supports efficient resource sharing across diverse workloads, which suits large-scale, fault-tolerant distributed applications.