kubernetes

Kubernetes (K8s) is an open‑source container orchestration platform designed to automate the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. Originally developed by Google and now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), Kubernetes provides a resilient framework for running distributed systems at scale across clusters of machines. It handles core operational tasks like service discovery, load balancing, rollout automation, and self‑healing, making it the industry standard for container orchestration.

Benefits of Kubernetes

• Automated scaling & workload management: Kubernetes can scale applications horizontally based on resource usage or manual settings, ensuring workloads adapt to demand.
• Self‑healing: Automatically restarts, replaces, and reschedules containers when failures occur, ensuring only healthy Pods serve traffic.
• Consistent, declarative deployments: Kubernetes maintains the desired application state and supports automated rollouts and rollbacks.
• Service discovery & load balancing: Exposes services using DNS/IP and distributes network traffic evenly across Pods.
• Portability across environments: Runs on bare metal, VMs, private clouds, public clouds, and hybrid architectures with the same operational model.
• Storage orchestration: Automatically mounts storage systems from local, cloud, or network sources.

Typical Use Cases

• Running microservices‑based architectures and distributed applications at scale
• Zero‑downtime deployments using rolling updates or canary patterns
• Autoscaling APIs, web apps, and background workers based on metrics or load
• Managing multi‑tenant dev/test/prod environments with consistent policies and isolation
• Deploying hybrid or multi‑cloud workloads across diverse infrastructure stacks
• Operating stateful workloads with storage orchestration and self‑healing capabilities