Signs it is time to revisit container orchestration

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. A few signals that container orchestration is due some attention.

Operability is a feature, and it has to be built rather than bought. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

The signals

• Nobody can say when it was last reviewed
• The answer depends on who you ask
• Orchestration solves real problems and creates new ones
• Most small teams need far less of it than they deploy

What good looks like

Understand what breaks before you depend on it. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

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
• Most small teams need far less of it than they deploy — 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.