A previous article on next-generation cloud technologies listed container orchestration as one of the emerging technologies to know. As the use of containers increases and organizations deploy them more widely, the need for tools to manage containers across the infrastructure also increases. Orchestrating a cluster of containers is a competitive and rapidly evolving area, and many tools exist offering various feature sets.

Container orchestration tools can be broadly defined as providing an enterprise-level framework for integrating and managing containers at scale. Such tools aim to simplify container management and provide a framework not only for defining initial container deployment but also for managing multiple containers as one entity — for purposes of availability, scaling, and networking.

Some container orchestration tools to know about include:

Amazon ECS — The Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS) supports Docker containers and lets you run applications on a managed cluster of Amazon EC2 instances.

Azure Container Service (ACS) — ACS lets you create a cluster of virtual machines that act as container hosts along with master machines that are used to manage your application containers.

Cloud Foundry’s Diego — Diego is a container management system that combines a scheduler, runner, and health manager. It is a rewrite of the Cloud Foundry runtime.

CoreOS Fleet — Fleet is a container management tool that lets you deploy Docker containers on hosts in a cluster as well as distribute services across a cluster.

Docker Swarm — Docker Swarm provides native clustering functionality for Docker containers, which lets you turn a group of Docker engines into a single, virtual Docker engine.

Google Container Engine — Google Container Engine, which is built on Kubernetes, lets you run Docker containers on the Google Cloud platform. It schedules containers into the cluster and manages them based on user-defined requirements.

Kubernetes — Kubernetes is an orchestration system for Docker containers. It handles scheduling and manages workloads based on user-defined parameters.

Mesosphere Marathon — Marathon is a container orchestration framework for Apache Mesos that is designed to launch long-running applications. It offers key features for running applications in a clustered environment.

Additionally, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is focused on integrating the orchestration layer of the container ecosystem. The CNCF’s stated goal is to create and drive adoption of a new set of common container technologies, and it recently selected Google’s Kubernetes container orchestration tool as its first containerization technology.

You can learn more about Container Orchestration and other next-gen cloud technologies through The Linux Foundation Training free “Cloud Infrastructure Technologies” course — a massively open online course being offered through edX. Registration for this course is open now, and course content will be available in June.