Knowledge Bank · DevOps & SRE

What Is Kubernetes?

By Karthick Selvam · Published · Updated

Kubernetes is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling and management of containerised applications.

Origins

It was open-sourced by Google in 2014 and is maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

Key objects

Pods (one or more containers), Deployments (desired state for pods), Services (stable networking), ConfigMaps and Secrets (configuration), and Namespaces.

How it works

You declare the desired state in YAML; the control plane continuously works to make the cluster match it.

Managed options

Amazon EKS, Azure AKS and Google GKE run the control plane for you.

Frequently asked questions

Is Kubernetes hard to learn?

The basics are approachable; operating clusters well takes significant experience.

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