Before you invest in container orchestration

The version of this that works is simpler than the version most people imagine. Before you spend anything on container orchestration, it is worth confirming a few things are already true.

Cloud work rewards teams who automate early and punishes teams who click through consoles. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

Prerequisites

• You can describe the outcome you want in one sentence
• Someone owns it after the work is done
• Orchestration solves real problems and creates new ones
• You have a way to tell whether it worked

Common failure modes

Most small teams need far less of it than they deploy. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

Understand what breaks before you depend on it. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

In practice

The bill is a design document: it tells you exactly what your architecture actually does. Three things worth confirming about container orchestration before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Understand what breaks before you depend on it — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.