Kubernetes, often abbreviated as 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 has become the industry standard for modern cloud-native infrastructure. It abstracts the complexities of managing containers across clusters of servers, ensuring applications run reliably and efficiently, regardless of the underlying hardware or cloud provider.
At its core, Kubernetes manages workloads through declarative configuration and desired-state management. Developers define how applications should run, how many instances, what resources they need, and how they should communicate, and Kubernetes continuously monitors the system to maintain that desired state. It handles tasks such as load balancing, self-healing (by automatically restarting failed containers), service discovery, and rolling updates.
By decoupling applications from infrastructure, Kubernetes enables true portability, scalability, and resilience. It’s widely used in DevOps environments and microservices architectures, empowering teams to deploy updates faster, reduce downtime, and achieve consistent performance across hybrid or multi-cloud environments. In short, Kubernetes is the backbone of modern, automated application delivery.