What is Kubernetes?

A container orchestration platform that’s gaining adoption at an astounding rate. It’s the flagship project of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and is backed by companies like Google, Amazon Web Services, IBM, Cisco, Intel, and Red Hat.

Kubernetes, or K8s as it’s often abbreviated to, allows you to manage a group of containers called pods in a cluster that can be running on either virtual or bare-metal machines. It handles operations such as starting, stopping, and replicating a pod; it configures networking; and it automatically adjusts the number of instances of a pod to match its desired state. It’s an open source container management system with a large, active community that enables a variety of deployment strategies and provides observability into your application.

IT professionals often struggle to deploy and operate containers at scale on their own. Kubernetes solves that by simplifying the process through a set of tools and abstractions. IT teams also use it for continuous integration and delivery to rapidly build and test new features, and to deploy them in production with confidence.

K8s supports a wide range of workloads from stateless to stateful, and it works on any cloud provider or on-premise infrastructure. It delivers high-availability and scalability, reduces infrastructure costs through auto-scaling, and improves IT productivity by automating tasks that would otherwise be manual. It also helps businesses avoid vendor lock-in by enabling them to move their applications to different environments without redesigning them.kubernetes