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Software Engineering vocabulary · Release and Maintenance

Orchestration

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

/ˌɔːrkɪˈstreɪʃən/nounCommon term

In software engineering, orchestration means: The automatic management of many containers or services: deciding where they run, starting and restarting them, connecting them and scaling them.

In Turkish: orkestrasyon, konteyner orkestrasyonu

How it is used

Usually in the phrase 'container orchestration'. Kubernetes is the dominant orchestration tool; others include Docker Swarm, HashiCorp Nomad and Amazon ECS. The tool itself is called an orchestrator.

Example sentences

  1. Once we had forty containers, we needed proper orchestration instead of shell scripts.

  2. Container orchestration takes care of restarts, so you don't have to watch every service.

Common collocations

  • container orchestration
  • orchestration platform
  • orchestration tool
  • orchestration layer
  • KubernetesAn open-source system that runs and manages containers across many machines: it starts them, restarts failed ones, spreads traffic and scales them up or down.
  • containerA lightweight, isolated package that holds an application together with everything it needs to run, so it behaves the same on a laptop, a test server or in the cloud.
  • clusterA group of connected machines that work together as one system, for example to run containers in Kubernetes or to store data in a database.
  • autoscalingAutomatically adding servers or containers when demand rises and removing them when it falls, based on rules such as CPU use or number of requests.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Release and Maintenance

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