Kubernetes is a portable, extensible, open-source platform for managing containerized workloads and services, that facilitates both declarative configuration and automation.

Going back in time

Container Deployment Era

Containers are similar to VMs, but they have relaxed isolation properties to share the Operating System (OS) among the applications. Therefore, containers are considered lightweight. Similar to a VM, a container has its own filesystem, share of CPU, memory, process space, and more. As they are decoupled from the underlying infrastructure, they are portable across clouds and OS distributions.

Containers have become popular because they provide extra benefits, such as:

• Agile application creation and deployment: increased ease and efficiency of container image creation compared to VM image use.
• Continuous development, integration, and deployment: provides for reliable and frequent container image build and deployment with quick and easy rollbacks (due to image immutability).
• Dev and Ops separation of concerns: create application container images at build / release time rather than deployment time, thereby decoupling applications from infrastructure.
• Observability not only surfaces OS-level information and metrics, but also application health and other signals.
• Environmental consistency across development, testing, and production.
• Cloud and OS distribution portability.
• Application-centric management: Raises the level of abstraction from running an OS on virtual hardware to running an application on an OS using logical resources.
• Loosely coupled, distributed, elastic, liberated micro-services: applications are broken into smaller, independent pieces and can be deployed and managed dynamically—not a monolithic stack running on one big single-purpose machine.

Why you need Kubernetes and what it can do