Cluster management

The microservices architecture influences application packaging and transferring across hosts/environments at a faster pace, as a result enterprises adapting to containerization face problems with increasing number of containers. Containers created new administration challenges for enterprises, such as managing a group of containers or a cluster of container hosts. A container cluster is a group of nodes, each node is a container host and it has containers running inside. It is important for enterprises/teams to facilitate manage the containers hosts and facilitate communication channels across container hosts.

Cluster management tools help operations teams or administrators to manage containers and container hosts from single management consoles. They assist in moving containers from one host to another, control resource management (CPU, memory, and network allocation), executing workflows, scheduling jobs/tasks (jobs/tasks is a set of steps to be executed on a cluster(s)), monitoring, reliability, scalability, and so on. Now that you know what clusters are, let's see the variety of offerings available on the market today and the core values offered by each one. Cluster management will be discussed in more detail in following chapters.