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What Is Kubernetes? A Guide to Container Orchestration

Kubernetes, also known as K8s, is an open-source platform for automating the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. While tools like Docker are excellent for creating and running individual containers, Kubernetes orchestrates them at scale, ensuring that complex, multi-container applications run reliably across a cluster of machines.

By managing the application lifecycle, Kubernetes provides a robust framework for running distributed systems resiliently.

  • Automated Scaling and Self-Healing: Kubernetes can automatically scale applications based on resource usage and restart containers that fail, replacing and rescheduling them on healthy nodes to ensure high availability.
  • Service Discovery and Load Balancing: It assigns stable IP addresses and DNS names to containers and can load-balance traffic across them, simplifying communication between microservices.
  • Declarative Configuration: You define the desired state of your application (e.g., "run three instances of this container"), and Kubernetes works continuously to maintain that state.
  • Environment Consistency: It provides a consistent runtime environment across development, testing, and production, whether on-premises, in a public cloud, or in a hybrid setup.

This section covers the core architecture, key components, and foundational concepts of the Kubernetes ecosystem.