What is Kubernetes?
Kubernetes (K8s) is an open-source container orchestration platform that automates the deployment, scaling, management, and networking of containerized applications across clusters of machines.
How Does Kubernetes Work?
Originally developed by Google and now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), Kubernetes manages groups of containers organized into logical units called pods. It provides declarative configuration: you define the desired state of your application (how many replicas, resource limits, health checks, networking rules) in YAML manifests, and Kubernetes continuously works to maintain that state. If a container crashes, Kubernetes automatically restarts it. If a node fails, workloads are rescheduled to healthy nodes.
Key Kubernetes features include horizontal pod autoscaling (automatically adjusting replica count based on load), service discovery and load balancing, rolling updates and rollbacks, secret and configuration management, and persistent storage orchestration. Managed Kubernetes services from cloud providers (EKS, GKE, AKS) simplify cluster operations by handling the control plane. Kubernetes has become the de facto standard for running production containerized workloads, from small startups to large enterprises.