what is kubernetes?
Kubernetes is an open-source platform designed to automate the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications across clusters of computers.
Kubernetes, often abbreviated as K8s, was originally developed by Google and is now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). It serves as a powerful container orchestration system that helps developers and IT teams efficiently manage applications built with containers such as Docker.
Key Features of Kubernetes:
Container Orchestration: Kubernetes coordinates containers across multiple hosts, ensuring they run reliably and at scale.
Automatic Scaling: It can automatically increase or decrease the number of running containers based on demand or performance metrics.
Self-Healing: Kubernetes can detect failed containers or nodes and restart or replace them to maintain application availability.
Service Discovery and Load Balancing: Kubernetes provides internal DNS and load balancing to distribute traffic among containers, making services discoverable and reliable.
Declarative Configuration: Using YAML or JSON files, users define the desired state of their applications, and Kubernetes works to maintain that state.
Rolling Updates and Rollbacks: It supports updating applications without downtime by gradually replacing containers, and it can roll back changes if issues arise.
Use Cases:
Kubernetes is widely used in modern cloud-native applications, microservices architectures, and for running distributed systems that require high availability, agility, and efficient resource utilization. It can run on most environments, including on-premises data centers, public clouds like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, or hybrid setups.
Overall, Kubernetes greatly simplifies the complexity of managing large-scale containerized environments, making application development and operations more streamlined and resilient.