Kubernetes is the popular open-sourced highly scalable containerized Cloud Orchestration platform. With Kubernetes, you can create an isolated environment for application deployments without caring about the underlying infrastructure like you would with Vagrant or AWS Elasticache.
While this was already possible with other DevOps tools, someone finally created it all in one place. Now there's no need to hear your coworkers screaming about how insufficient their containers are while they're trying to debug production issues on their workstation.
What is Kubernetes?
Kubernetes is what the docker guys call an orchestrator for docker containers. It essentially takes an entire data center and says "Here's this group of Docker Containers, but instead of you having to worry about running them yourself, why don't I just do it for you?".
Kubernetes actually manages the resources in the data center including hardware, networking, etc. So when you are looking at your containers, it knows how to direct network traffic, where are there are physical resources that have flexibility in how they can be allocated, etc.
Kubernetes was originally created by Google to process a large volume of containerized workloads. Google open-sourced Kubernetes in November 2014 and is backed by a diverse set of companies interested in running applications on Kubernetes.
Since then, the tool grew into a production-grade system that runs thousands of applications throughout the world serving billions of users every day.
How is it different from Docker?
Kubernetes is the Google Cloud Platform native container orchestration tool. It makes it easier for companies to run applications in the cloud.
The tools enable large-scale application deployment, network routing, service discovery, and master services. One of its biggest strengths is that all the processes are contained within the Kubernetes cluster - Docker containers can be deployed to different hosts or regions to manage separation between workloads.
Why you should know about Kubernetes?
Kubernetes is a container orchestration system that allows groups of machines to be assembled and dispersed on demand. Kubernetes manages and deploys services across multiple hosts and works with many different containers of applications.
With this tool, developers can roll out the software in different environments whilst monitoring and automating the creation, configuration, updating, and rollout of the environment.
Who uses Kubernetes
As more and more companies and computer scientists migrate to using containers for running applications, like Kubernetes, there is greater use of container clusters.
A container cluster contains virtual instances of computer processes that share the same amount of resources. This apportioning of resources helps to ensure that no one process builds up too much power as well as that if a single node fails, then milliseconds later another new node will be allocated.
Conclusion
Kubernetes is an open-source project to orchestrate and automate the deployment of software applications across clusters of Linux servers. If you are wondering, you should know what it is because cluster servers make Kubernetes an essential part of modern computing architecture.
