Kubernetes is an open-source platform for managing containerized workloads and services. Originally developed by Google, to meet internal demands, Kubernetes was designed to run containers at scale. To illustrate what Kubernetes is capable of: Google generates more than a billion container deployments a week. Before diving into the capabilities of Kubernetes, it is important to understand how these containers exactly work.

In essence, the containers are a way of packaging applications. Containers are immutable objects containing all your application’s code, libraries, and dependencies. This makes containers predictable and repeatable, as they can be moved or duplicated across different machines. Running a container is comparable to running a virtual machine, but without having the overhead of running an entire operating system, resulting in increased performance and more efficient use of resources. These characteristics make containers very popular in modern cloud solutions and often used in a microservice architecture.

Spinning up containers one by one and maintaining them is becoming a labor-intensive process, especially if you want to run multiple containers across multiple machines. That’s where Kubernetes comes in! Kubernetes is a so-called container orchestrator, combining groups of hosts in clusters and manage container deploys across these clusters. Kubernetes automates many processes associated with the deployment and scaling of containerized applications.

1. Self-healing: if a container fails, Kubernetes is able to create a new container right away, ensuring high availability.
2. Container management: Kubernetes can handle container deployments across thousands of servers while operating as a single unit, with a single interface.
3. Horizontal scaling: When visits towards your app or web service increases, Kubernetes can automatically replicate containers and balance the load between them. This ensures optimal user experience and makes your application resilient to unexpected surges in usage.
4. No vendor lock-in: Kubernetes is open source and not limited to a single infrastructure, this makes it a flexible solution. You can always migrate your apps from one cloud to another.
5. Rolling updates: Kubernetes allows to deploy updates with zero downtime. This is done by updating container instances with new ones, one by one. The update schedule is based on available node resources. This means no more downtime to deploy new versions of your application.