What is Kubernetes https://kubernetes.

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What is Kubernetes

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This page is an overview of Kubernetes.

Going back in time

Why you need Kubernetes and what can it do
What Kubernetes is not
What's next

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. Google open-
sourced the Kubernetes project in 2014. Kubernetes builds upon a decade and a half of
experience that Google has with running production workloads at scale, combined with
best-of-breed ideas and practices from the community.

Going back in time

Let’s take a look at why Kubernetes is so useful by going back in time.

Traditional deployment era: Early on, organizations ran applications on physical

servers. There was no way to define resource boundaries for applications in a physical
server, and this caused resource allocation issues. For example, if multiple applications
run on a physical server, there can be instances where one application would take up most
of the resources, and as a result, the other applications would underperform. A solution for
this would be to run each application on a different physical server. But this did not scale
as resources were underutilized, and it was expensive for organizations to maintain many
physical servers.

Virtualized deployment era: As a solution, virtualization was introduced. It allows you

to run multiple Virtual Machines (VMs) on a single physical server’s CPU. Virtualization
allows applications to be isolated between VMs and provides a level of security as the
information of one application cannot be freely accessed by another application.

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Virtualization allows better utilization of resources in a physical server and allows better
scalability because an application can be added or updated easily, reduces hardware costs,
and much more.

Each VM is a full machine running all the components, including its own operating
system, on top of the virtualized hardware.

Container deployment era: Containers are similar to VMs, but they have relaxed
isolation properties to share the Operating System (OS) among the applications.
Therefore, containers are considered lightweight. Similar to a VM, a container has its own
filesystem, CPU, memory, process space, and more. As they are decoupled from the
underlying infrastructure, they are portable across clouds and OS distributions.

Containers are becoming popular because they have many benefits. Some of the container
benefits are listed below:

Agile application creation and deployment: increased ease and efficiency of

container image creation compared to VM image use.
Continuous development, integration, and deployment: provides for reliable and
frequent container image build and deployment with quick and easy rollbacks (due
to image immutability).
Dev and Ops separation of concerns: create application container images at
build/release time rather than deployment time, thereby decoupling applications
from infrastructure.
Observability not only surfaces OS-level information and metrics, but also
application health and other signals.
Environmental consistency across development, testing, and production: Runs the
same on a laptop as it does in the cloud.
Cloud and OS distribution portability: Runs on Ubuntu, RHEL, CoreOS, on-prem,
Google Kubernetes Engine, and anywhere else.
Application-centric management: Raises the level of abstraction from running an OS
on virtual hardware to running an application on an OS using logical resources.
Loosely coupled, distributed, elastic, liberated micro-services: applications are
broken into smaller, independent pieces and can be deployed and managed
dynamically – not a monolithic stack running on one big single-purpose machine.
Resource isolation: predictable application performance.
Resource utilization: high efficiency and density.

Why you need Kubernetes and what can it do

Containers are a good way to bundle and run your applications. In a production
environment, you need to manage the containers that run the applications and ensure that
there is no downtime. For example, if a container goes down, another container needs to
start. Wouldn’t it be easier if this behavior was handled by a system?

That’s how Kubernetes comes to the rescue! Kubernetes provides you with a framework to
run distributed systems resiliently. It takes care of your scaling requirements, failover,
deployment patterns, and more. For example, Kubernetes can easily manage a canary
deployment for your system.

Kubernetes provides you with:

Service discovery and load balancing

Kubernetes can expose a container using the DNS name or using their own IP
address. If traffic to a container is high, Kubernetes is able to load balance and
distribute the network traffic so that the deployment is stable.

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Storage orchestration
Kubernetes allows you to automatically mount a storage system of your choice, such
as local storages, public cloud providers, and more.
Automated rollouts and rollbacks
You can describe the desired state for your deployed containers using Kubernetes,
and it can change the actual state to the desired state at a controlled rate. For
example, you can automate Kubernetes to create new containers for your
deployment, remove existing containers and adopt all their resources to the new
container.
Automatic bin packing
Kubernetes allows you to specify how much CPU and memory (RAM) each container
needs. When containers have resource requests specified, Kubernetes can make
better decisions to manage the resources for containers.
Self-healing
Kubernetes restarts containers that fail, replaces containers, kills containers that
don’t respond to your user-defined health check, and doesn’t advertise them to
clients until they are ready to serve.
Secret and configuration management
Kubernetes lets you store and manage sensitive information, such as passwords,
OAuth tokens, and ssh keys. You can deploy and update secrets and application
configuration without rebuilding your container images, and without exposing
secrets in your stack configuration.

What Kubernetes is not

Kubernetes is not a traditional, all-inclusive PaaS (Platform as a Service) system. Since
Kubernetes operates at the container level rather than at the hardware level, it provides
some generally applicable features common to PaaS offerings, such as deployment,
scaling, load balancing, logging, and monitoring. However, Kubernetes is not monolithic,
and these default solutions are optional and pluggable. Kubernetes provides the building
blocks for building developer platforms, but preserves user choice and flexibility where it
is important.

Kubernetes:

Does not limit the types of applications supported. Kubernetes aims to support an
extremely diverse variety of workloads, including stateless, stateful, and data-
processing workloads. If an application can run in a container, it should run great on
Kubernetes.
Does not deploy source code and does not build your application. Continuous
Integration, Delivery, and Deployment (CI/CD) workflows are determined by
organization cultures and preferences as well as technical requirements.
Does not provide application-level services, such as middleware (for example,
message buses), data-processing frameworks (for example, Spark), databases (for
example, mysql), caches, nor cluster storage systems (for example, Ceph) as built-in
services. Such components can run on Kubernetes, and/or can be accessed by
applications running on Kubernetes through portable mechanisms, such as the Open
Service Broker.
Does not dictate logging, monitoring, or alerting solutions. It provides some
integrations as proof of concept, and mechanisms to collect and export metrics.
Does not provide nor mandate a configuration language/system (for example,
jsonnet). It provides a declarative API that may be targeted by arbitrary forms of
declarative specifications.
Does not provide nor adopt any comprehensive machine configuration,
maintenance, management, or self-healing systems.

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Additionally, Kubernetes is not a mere orchestration system. In fact, it eliminates the

need for orchestration. The technical definition of orchestration is execution of a
defined workflow: first do A, then B, then C. In contrast, Kubernetes comprises a set
of independent, composable control processes that continuously drive the current
state towards the provided desired state. It shouldn’t matter how you get from A to
C. Centralized control is also not required. This results in a system that is easier to
use and more powerful, robust, resilient, and extensible.

What's next
Take a look at the Kubernetes Components
Ready to Get Started?

Feedback
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Thanks for the feedback. If you have a specific, answerable question about how to use
Kubernetes, ask it on Stack Overflow. Open an issue in the GitHub repo if you want to
report a problem or suggest an improvement.

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