A complete guide to microservice orchestration: tools, examples & more

As organizations continue to adopt a microservice architecture, they face new challenges when it comes to managing and coordinating the interactions between multiple services within a distributed system. A distributed system can quickly become chaotic without proper management and orchestration—failures in one service can cascade and affect the entire system, leading to downtime and poor customer experiences. 

But effective microservice orchestration solves some of the challenges associated with managing and coordinating multiple services within a distributed system.

This post explores the critical aspects of microservice orchestration, including the benefits of implementing orchestration in your organization. We’ll also show you some popular tools and platforms used for microservice orchestration.

What is microservice orchestration?

Microservice orchestration is the process of managing and coordinating multiple independent microservices within a distributed software system. It involves automating the deployment, scaling, and operational management of these services to ensure they work together efficiently and reliably.

In practice, microservice orchestration addresses several key challenges:

Service Discovery: Orchestration tools help microservices locate and communicate with each other dynamically. For example, when a new instance of a payment processing service is deployed, the orchestrator ensures that other services, like the order management service, can find and interact with it.

Load Balancing: Orchestration manages traffic distribution across multiple instances of a microservice. For instance, if an e-commerce platform experiences a surge in user activity, the orchestrator can automatically scale up the product catalog service and evenly distribute incoming requests.

Fault Tolerance: Orchestration tools monitor the health of microservices and can automatically restart failed services or reroute traffic away from unhealthy instances. If a recommendation engine service in a streaming platform becomes unresponsive, the orchestrator can quickly spin up a new instance to maintain system reliability.

Configuration Management: Orchestrators centralize and manage configuration data for microservices. This allows teams to easily update settings across multiple services. For example, changing database connection strings or API keys can be done once in the orchestrator rather than updating each service individually.

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Microservice orchestration tools

Several microservice orchestration tools are available on the market, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. Here are four of the most popular.

Kubernetes

Kubernetes is an open-source platform that automates the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. It’s a powerful microservice orchestration tool that helps organizations manage their microservices-based applications in a distributed environment.

At its core, Kubernetes provides a container orchestration system that allows developers to deploy and manage microservices as individual containers. It follows a declarative approach where developers specify the desired state, and Kubernetes handles the complexities of deploying and managing the microservice.

Kubernetes also provides several key features that make it an ideal microservice orchestration tool, including:

• Self-healing: Kubernetes automatically detects and replaces failed containers or nodes, ensuring that the system remains operational, even in the event of a failure.
• Scalability: Kubernetes makes it easy to scale individual microservices up or down based on demand, allowing organizations to handle large traffic and user volumes.
• Service discovery: Kubernetes provides a built-in service discovery mechanism that allows microservices to find and communicate with each other without manual configuration.

OpsLevel Kubernetes Syncer periodically scans your Kubernetes clusters for resources and automatically creates corresponding services and dependencies in OpsLevel.

Once resources have been discovered, the Kubernetes Syncer tracks and updates changes in microservices and their dependency information. This provides real-time visibility into the current state of your Kubernetes infrastructure.

Apache Mesos

Apache Mesos is an open-source platform that allows organizations to manage and orchestrate distributed systems and applications. It’s a powerful microservice orchestration tool that can deploy and manage complex microservice architectures in a highly efficient and scalable way.

Mesos also provides several key features that make it an ideal microservice orchestration tool:

• Resource isolation: Mesos enables organizations to create isolated environments for running microservices, ensuring that they do not interfere with each other and that resources are utilized efficiently.
• Fault tolerance: Mesos is designed to be highly resilient and fault tolerant, with built-in features that can detect and recover from failures quickly and automatically.
• Scalability: Mesos can scale up or down based on demand, enabling organizations to handle large volumes of traffic and users without compromising on performance or reliability.

Netflix Conductor

Netflix Conductor is an open-source microservice orchestration engine that provides a workflow and coordination service for microservices-based applications. It’s designed to simplify the development and deployment of microservices by providing a scalable, fault-tolerant, and highly available platform for managing workflows and coordinating tasks across multiple services.

Netflix Conductor’s key features include:

• Workflow management: Conductor provides a powerful workflow management engine that enables developers to create complex, long-running workflows across multiple services.
• Fault tolerance: Conductor is designed to be highly available and fault tolerant with built-in support for failure detection and recovery.
• Event-driven architecture: Conductor is built around an event-driven architecture, enabling it to respond to events and triggers in real time.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS)

ECS is a cloud-based container management service that Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides. It’s a microservice orchestration tool designed to make it easy to run and manage Docker containers at scale.

ECS allows developers to deploy and manage Docker containers on an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance cluster using the AWS Management Console, the ECS command line interface, or the ECS API.

The tool provides a range of features and benefits for managing containerized applications, including the following:

• Flexible deployment options: ECS allows developers to deploy containerized applications using various deployment options, including rolling updates, blue-green deployments, and canary deployments.
• Scalability and availability: ECS supports autoscaling and load balancing, allowing applications to scale horizontally to meet changing demands.
• Integration with AWS services: ECS integrates with other AWS services, such as Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), and Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), enabling developers to build and deploy more complex and scalable applications.

How to choose a microservice orchestration tool

Microservice orchestration provides several benefits for organizations building and managing microservices-based applications. As such, there are several factors you should consider when choosing a microservice orchestration tool, and these may include:

Scalability

Microservices are designed to be highly scalable. You should choose an orchestration tool that can handle their scaling needs. Consider the ability of the tool to automatically scale microservices based on demand and its ability to handle large-scale deployments.

Microservice orchestration tools should automatically scale microservices up or down based on demand, allowing organizations to handle large volumes of traffic and users.

Flexibility

‍You can build microservices using different programming languages, frameworks, and technologies. Therefore, it’s essential to choose an orchestration tool that’s flexible enough to support a wide range of technologies and provides seamless integration with your existing infrastructure.

Resilience

Microservices should be fault tolerant. Therefore, choose an orchestration tool that can handle failures gracefully and quickly recover in the event of a failure. A resilient orchestration tool reduces downtime and improves reliability.

Security

‍Microservices can be vulnerable to security threats, so be sure to choose an orchestration tool that provides robust security features like encryption, authentication, and access control. That way, you protect sensitive information and ensure secure communication between services.

‍Community support

‍The microservices landscape is constantly evolving, so it’s important to choose an orchestration tool with a strong community and a vibrant ecosystem of plugins, extensions, and integrations.

Cost

Some tools are open source and free, while others may require a license or subscription. Be sure to evaluate the cost in the context of the features and benefits provided by the tool.

Ease of use

The orchestration tool should be easy to use and manage, with a user-friendly interface and good documentation.

Microservice orchestration is essential for organizations looking to build and manage complex, distributed systems. Organizations can improve scalability, agility, reliability, resource utilization, and collaboration with the right orchestration tool. And with OpsLevel, you can easily catalog your microservices and ensure that they’re running smoothly, reliably, and efficiently. 

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