Container orchestration: a practical guide

We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. This guide covers what container orchestration actually involves, where it usually goes wrong, and how to tell whether yours is in reasonable shape.

Operability is a feature, and it has to be built rather than bought. Nothing below assumes a large team or a large budget — most of it is a decision somebody has to make and then write down.

What it costs to ignore

Orchestration solves real problems and creates new ones. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

For most businesses the question is not whether this matters but how much of it is worth doing right now. That depends on what you are trying to achieve in the next few months, not on best practice in the abstract. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly.

The practical version

Most small teams need far less of it than they deploy. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

Cloud work rewards teams who automate early and punishes teams who click through consoles. The version that works in practice is usually less elaborate than the version described in the guides.

Understand what breaks before you depend on it. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

A working checklist

If you want a quick read on where you stand, work through this. Anything you cannot answer confidently is where to start.

• Orchestration solves real problems and creates new ones
• Most small teams need far less of it than they deploy
• Understand what breaks before you depend on it
• Someone is named as the owner, not just assumed to be
• There is a date in the calendar to review it again
• The decision and the reasoning behind it are written down somewhere findable
• You could explain the current setup to a new hire in five minutes

What to watch for

The most common failure is not doing this badly. It is doing it once, during a launch, and never revisiting it. Circumstances move, the setup does not, and the gap widens quietly until something breaks or somebody notices the numbers.

• It was configured during a launch and has not been touched since
• Different people in the business believe different things are true about it
• There is no way to tell whether the last change helped or hurt
• The only person who understands it has left, or is about to

The bill is a design document: it tells you exactly what your architecture actually does. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets.

How we approach it

On our projects this gets handled during the build rather than added afterwards, because retrofitting it costs several times more than including it. We write down what was decided and why, so the next person to touch it is not guessing.

If you are working with someone else, the questions worth asking are simple: who owns this, how will we know it is working, and what happens when it needs to change?

A reasonable first step

Pick the single item from the checklist above that would cause the most trouble if it turned out to be wrong. Fix that one, confirm it worked, then move on. Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.