5.3. Orchestration Concepts and Cloud Integration
Orchestration manages containers and services at scale — starting them, scaling them, routing traffic to them, restarting failed ones. Where a single Docker command runs one container, Kubernetes manages thousands. For XK0-006, orchestration concepts are tested at the awareness level: know the tools, their purpose, and key concepts.
💡 First Principle: Orchestration solves the problems that emerge at scale: "Which host runs this container?", "How do I restart it when it crashes?", "How do I route requests to 20 instances?", "How do I roll out an update without downtime?" Individual container commands don't answer these questions. Orchestrators do.
⚠️ Common Misconception: Kubernetes manages individual containers directly. Kubernetes manages Pods (one or more containers that share networking and storage). You don't tell Kubernetes to 'start a container' — you declare a Pod or Deployment, and Kubernetes schedules it. The container runtime (containerd, CRI-O) handles the actual container operations.
