Five mistakes teams make with container orchestration

The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit container orchestration.

Operability is a feature, and it has to be built rather than bought. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

What to watch for

• Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
• Assuming someone else already owns it
• Orchestration solves real problems and creates new ones
• Most small teams need far less of it than they deploy
• Never checking whether the fix actually worked

Understand what breaks before you depend on it. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

Where to go from here

How to tell if yours is fine

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
• Orchestration solves real problems and creates new ones — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.