What is Kubernetes?
What is Kubernetes?
Kubernetes is a portable, extensible, open source platform for managing containerized workloads and services, that facilitates both declarative configuration and automation. It has a large, rapidly growing ecosystem. Kubernetes services, support, and tools are widely available.
The name Kubernetes originates from Greek, meaning helmsman or pilot. K8s as an abbreviation results from counting the eight letters between the “K” and the “s”. Google open-sourced the Kubernetes project in 2014. Kubernetes combines over 15 years of Google’s experience running production workloads at scale with best-of-breed ideas and practices from the community.
Kubernetes Advantages
The Kubernetes platform has become popular because it provides a number of important advantages:
- Portability. Containers are portable across a range of environments from virtual environments to bare metal. Kubernetes is supported in all major public clouds, as a result, you can run containerized applications on K8s across many different environments.
- Integration and extensibility. Kubernetes is extensible to work with the solutions you already rely on, including logging, monitoring, and alerting services. The Kubernetes community is working on a variety of open source solutions complementary to Kubernetes, creating a rich and fast-growing ecosystem.
- Cost efficiency. Kubernetes’ inherent resource optimization, automated scaling, and flexibility to run workloads where they provide the most value means your IT spend is in your control.
- Scalability. Cloud native applications scale horizontally. Kubernetes uses “auto-scaling,” spinning up additional container instances and scaling out automatically in response to demand.
- API-based. The fundamental fabric of Kubernetes is its REST API. Everything in the Kubernetes environment can be controlled through programming.
- Simplified CI/CD. CI/CD is a DevOps practice that automates building, testing and deploying applications to production environments. Enterprises are integrating Kubernetes and CI/CD to create scalable CI/CD pipelines that adapt dynamically to load.