Best Practices for Containerization and Orchestration in a Cloud Environment


Cloud computing has captured businesses' attention in the last decade. If you're working in a cloud computing environment, you must have heard about two core ideas: Containerization and Orchestration. As a business, you must set up your cloud infrastructure, basically containerizing and orchestrating your systems skillfully so that apps and services can operate optimally without interruptions. This article will look at the best practices for containerization and orchestration in a cloud environment. Let's get started.

Understanding Containerization and Orchestration


Containerization's main goal is to simplify application deployment by bundling application code with all the necessary libraries and files within a single instance or infrastructure. It brings multiple business benefits, including portability, fault tolerance, agility, and security. It also facilitates, writes once, and deploys philosophy anywhere.

Orchestration helps you automate the coordination, management, and configuration of multiple applications, computers, and services. It allows teams to automate a large workflow, especially when working with multiple systems simultaneously. It enables teams to efficiently automate workflow, reducing manual work and its associated errors. It also makes scalability easy and adds the necessary agility to the project, improving responsiveness and agility.

Every cloud provider, including Google, Amazon, and Docker Cloud, supports containerization and orchestration, allowing teams to manage their apps and services using cloud computing.

Best Containerization and Orchestration Practices in Cloud


According to Gartner, by 2023, 75% of global organizations will shift to containerized applications due to the benefits they provide. 86% of the technology leaders plan to move to containerization technology. So, if you’re in the same boat and want to move to a cloud environment, you must know the best containerization practices and orchestration practices. Let’s first go through the containerization best practices below.

Best Practices for Conternization in Cloud Environment

Below are some of the best practices you should follow when using container technology in a cloud environment.

  • Long-term planning and requirement understanding: Before you start with containers, you must understand it completely and not move just for the sake of it. With containerization comes the technical challenges and the need for a capable team to deploy and maintain the apps for the long term.
  • Migration strategy: Not everyone starts with the cloud environment. If you want to shift to the cloud, you must carry out the migration properly. This can include migration strategies such as lift and shift, rewrite, and augment. During migration, you can also refactor code.
  • Rewrite older parts for better maintainability: You may also want to rewrite components using legacy code during migration. This will help you to improve your system’s age, making it less susceptible to operational issues in the future.

Apart from these initial considerations, other best practices include:

  • Always aim to use a single application per container. This will help you to manage the app lifecycle along with the container. If a container starts, the app will start working and end when the container stops itself.
  • Ensure to take the Docker cache into account when optimizing builds. It’ll help you decrease costs and improve pipeline efficiency.
  • Stateless applications can help you to enjoy horizontal scaling.
  • Keep container images smaller to facilitate faster loading to memory and execution.
  • Tag your images correctly for better production.
  • Use persistent data storage to ensure container size doesn’t grow with data.
  • Use proper DevOps practices such as CI/CD to improve deployment.
  • Use container orchestration tools to help you manage containers without worrying about complexity.
  • Make sure to protect container runtime.
  • Use container security policies properly to protect it from malicious actors.

Best Practices for Container Orchestration in Cloud Environment


The best practices for orchestration in a cloud environment include:

  • Automate issue reporting to help manage the end-to-end systems. You can set up monitoring and management tools to monitor system health and then automate actions based on the findings. This will prevent outages and improve fixed deployment.
  • Make sure to set up and automate proper data backup and disaster recovery.
  • Always build workflows, keeping external stakeholders' interests, especially the end user.
  • Make sure that you use version control throughout orchestration.
  • Avoid monoliths, and think in microservices to easily work with components and create meaningful and approachable workflow components.

Summary

As a developer, you must always follow the best practices and not try to reinvent the wheel. It is crucial to understand your requirements as well. Most leaders are shifting towards container apps. However, it might not be for you. So, evaluate first and then make the move, as it is a long-term commitment for your team and the product. If you need expert help, check out Bytecific, a group of talented developers with years of experience working with the cloud.