Cloud & DevOps
Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration platform that automates the deployment, scaling, load balancing, self-healing, and management of containerised applications across clusters of machines.
Originally developed by Google and donated to the CNCF in 2014, Kubernetes abstracts the underlying infrastructure so developers declare the desired state of their application (e.g., 'run 5 replicas of this container') and Kubernetes continuously reconciles the actual state to match it. When a container crashes, Kubernetes restarts it; when traffic spikes, it scales out additional pods; when a node fails, it reschedules workloads to healthy nodes — all automatically. Kubernetes introduces a rich set of primitives — Pods, Deployments, Services, ConfigMaps, Ingress, and more — that together provide a complete application runtime environment. Managing Kubernetes clusters has a steep operational learning curve, which is why managed services like AWS EKS, Google GKE, and Azure AKS are widely used to reduce that burden.
Example
An online education platform runs 200 microservices on a Kubernetes cluster across three availability zones, with Kubernetes automatically rebalancing workloads when one zone experiences a hardware failure.
Related terms
Docker
Docker is an open-source platform that enables developers to build, package, and distribute applications as portable containers, each bundling the application code with its exact runtime environment.
Containerization
Containerization is a lightweight virtualisation technique that packages an application and all its dependencies — libraries, configuration, and runtime — into a portable, isolated container that runs consistently across any environment.
Microservices
Microservices is an architectural style in which a large application is built as a collection of small, independently deployable services, each responsible for a specific business capability and communicating via APIs.
Load Balancing
Load balancing is the process of distributing incoming network traffic across multiple servers or instances to prevent any single server from becoming a bottleneck, improving application availability, throughput, and fault tolerance.
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