What is Kubernetes?

Here we'll be providing a brief introduction of what Kubernetes is along with some of its greatest benefits. For a full overview and documentation, please refer to the official Kubernetes docs. There are even interactive tutorials available for you there as well.

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So what is Kubernetes?

Kubernetes is a portable, extensible, open-source platform for managing containerized workloads and services, that facilitates both declarative configuration and automation.

This is a very technical description, so in other words, Kubernetes is an excellent system for intelligently managing containers and maintaining a desired cluster state. For example, say you want to maintain 3 containerized applications at all times with automatic restarts, failure handling, and load balancing. Kubernetes would be your solution.

Another way of understanding is to just take a look at some of the features that Kubernetes provides.

Self Healing

As mentioned in the example above, Kubernetes is capable of automatically ensuring that a desired state of containers is maintained. When containers fail, they can automatically be restarted, or even killed if they don't meet defined health check requirements.

Service Discovery & Load Balancing

Kubernetes can expose containers via DNS names or by their IP as well as scaling traffic to your containers through load balancers if traffic is high. This ensures that network traffic is distrubuted evenly and the deployment state of the containers remains stable.

Automated Rollouts & Rollbacks

You can describe the desired state for your deployed containers using Kubernetes, and it can change the actual state to the desired state at a controlled rate. For example, you can automate Kubernetes for different deployment strategies in order to create new containers, remove existing containers and adopt all their resources to the new ones.

Open Sourced by Google

Google open-sourced the Kubernetes project in 2014. Kubernetes combines over 15 years of Google's experience running production workloads at scale with best-of-breed ideas and practices from the community.

note

Keep in mind that there are many aspects to Kubernetes and this page is just meant to be an introduction to the technology