Key Characteristics of a Container Orchestration Platform to Enable a Modern Application
Asif Uddin Khan · IEEE Cloud Computing · 2017
As compute evolves from bare metal to virtualized environments to containers towards server-less, the efficiency gains have enabled a wide variety of use cases. Organizations have used containers to run long running services, batch processing at scale, control planes, Internet of Things, and Artificial Intelligence workloads. Further, methodologies for software as a service, such as twelve-factor app, emphasize a clean contract with the underlying operating system and maximum portability between execution environments. In this paper, we address a set of capabilities required of a container orchestration platform to embody the design principles as illustrated by twelve factor app design. This paper also provides a non-exhaustive and prescriptive guide to identifying and implementing key mechanisms required in a container orchestration platform. We will cover capabilities such as cluster state management and scheduling, high availability and fault tolerance, security, networking, service discovery, continuous deployment, monitoring, and governance.