Kubernetes, often abbreviated as K8s (pronounced "K-8s"), is an open-source container orchestration platform originally developed by Google, and now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). It automates the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.
Here's a breakdown of its key components and functionalities:
- Container Orchestration: Kubernetes manages the lifecycle of containerized applications, handling deployment, scaling, and resource management. It abstracts away the underlying infrastructure, enabling developers to focus on building and deploying applications without concerning themselves with the specifics of the environment.
- Cluster Management: Kubernetes organizes containers into logical units called pods, which are the smallest deployable units in Kubernetes. Pods can contain one or more containers that share resources and networking.
- Scaling and Load Balancing: Kubernetes can automatically scale applications based on resource usage or user-defined metrics. It also distributes incoming traffic among instances of an application to ensure optimal performance and reliability.
- Service Discovery and Networking: Kubernetes provides networking capabilities to ensure that containers can communicate with each other seamlessly within the cluster. It also offers built-in service discovery mechanisms, allowing containers to locate and communicate with each other by using DNS or environment variables.
- Storage Orchestration: Kubernetes manages storage for containerized applications, allowing them to dynamically provision and attach storage volumes to pods as needed.
- Self-healing: Kubernetes monitors the health of applications and automatically restarts or replaces containers that fail. It also reschedules containers onto healthy nodes if a node fails.
- Rolling Updates and Rollbacks: Kubernetes supports rolling updates, enabling seamless deployment of new versions of applications without downtime. It also facilitates rollbacks to previous versions if issues arise during the update process.
The term "K8s" is derived from the word "Kubernetes" by replacing the eight letters between "K" and "s" with the number 8. This abbreviation is commonly used in discussions, documentation, and command-line interfaces as a shorthand for Kubernetes.
