What does Kubernetes actually do?

What is Kubernetes?

Kubernetes is an open source system for managing containerized applications across multiple hosts, providing basic mechanisms for deployment, maintenance and scaling of applications. It’s created by Google. Due to its design, you can implement compatibility with any container engine, but for now it’s limited to Docker.

Why is it important?

The purpose of Kubernetes is that it makes it easier to organize and schedule your application across a fleet of machines. At a high level, it is an operating system for your cluster.

Basically, it allows you to not worry about what specific machine in your datacenter each application runs on. Also, it provides generic primitives for health checking and replicating your application across these machines, as well as services for wiring your application into micro-services so that each layer in your application is decoupled from other layers. So in the end, you can scale, update and maintain them independently.

Real Life Example

A container is a process that runs in isolation as if it has its own environment, network and file system.

Think of a hotel, what if hotel would provide a big hall to all the guests where they are supposed to stay during…