What is the difference between managing 10 and 1000 containers?

Question

I am trying to wrap my head around scalability.From a dumb perspective, managing 1 container is different from managing 'n' (where n>1). I can understand that part. I guess I can even extend it to where 'n' is greater than 2, and certain decisions have to be made.But what is the difference between 5 containers and 50 or a thousands? I'd think at 5 containers you have already dealt with all issues around multi-tenancy. What changes from there to 1000 containers?

scrivna · Accepted Answer

It&rsquo;s also dependent on what those 1000 are. Is it 1 app x 1000 instances or is it 500 apps x 2 instances. The former with 1 or 2 different apps, not much would change, when you run lots of different apps though, then configuration of routes between different physical hosts and other odd network effects can start occurring. Rolling out updates takes significantly more time as you just have a larger number of nodes to get through, which means you&rsquo;ll very likely have multiple different versions of your app running at once, potentially expecting different database schemas, migrations etc. So I guess I'm saying it&rsquo;s mostly about the ops more than the underlying infrastructure, but its always both and there&rsquo;s always something that&rsquo;s a bottleneck somewhere

ruben81adelaide · Answer

If the containers are truly inmutable, the application has been designed for horizontal scalability and the automation is right, it doesn&rsquo;t make any difference to manage 5 containers or 1000 containers.The same applies for virtual machines. The difference is that it is usually easier to accomplish this with containers.