Kubernetes is an open-source, portable, and extensible platform for scaling, deploying and managing containerized applications and services for automation as well as declarative configurations. Using Kubernetes you can configure, automate, and manage the creation, movement, and deletion of containers, monitoring, and easy scaling of the containers. Kubernetes also help you in the management, automation, and configuration of balanced scheduling of the containers. 

Kubernetes is designed specifically for software development and operations working together to develop the final solution. It uses declarative constructs for composing applications, interacting with the applications, and managing applications. Kubernetes enables the portability and operability of advanced software systems. Developers can easily adopt GitOps workflows into their development pipelines.

What is the container?

Before we understand Kubernetes in-depth, we need to understand the container. A container is a small virtual machine without device drivers and other components. Containers give you a solution to the problem of how to run software reliably while moving from one computing environment to another; For example, from staging to a production environment or from developers' laptops to a test environment and Sometimes for moving from a physical machine to a cloud environment. 

A container includes an entire runtime environment like an application, configuration files, plus all its dependencies, other binaries, libraries and bundled into one package. A container could be of less size approximately ten megabytes in size due to this; a single server can host many containers. Containerized applications can start instantly and quickly and can be instantiated in just in time and can be free up easily. A major benefit of using a container is modularity; you can split the applications into models and run them instantly. 

Why Kubernetes?

Containers were introduced before Kubernetes. Containers became popular due to the simplified way from application development to deployment without worrying about portability. A complete developers' application package including libraries, configuration settings, and all its dependencies can be created using a Container image. A container is nothing but a runnable instance of an image and can be pulled from the registry and deployed anywhere like laptops, servers, cloud as well.

When compared to virtual machines, containers are lightweight, portable, and efficient. However, managing containers is a tricky and complex task. As there is a rapid increase in the containers market so admins need something more than containers. It was required to have something beyond just containers: monitoring multiple containers for shared resources, management of running containers, handling the not utilized – dead containers, auto-scaling of the containers, connecting containers to different external resources, and moving the containers. 

Kubernetes was introduced as a de facto standard for container orchestration. It comes with the power of containers and simplified management of clusters and services. Kubernetes helps you in building cloud-native systems and service implementation through small containers cloud. It is useful to add and adopt a range of services with easy use of containers.

Kubernetes allows an entire cluster deployment with workloads. It is composed of one master node and multiple worker nodes with applications run through Pods. A pod is nothing but grouping containers in a logical manner. These groupings can be scheduled with shared resources. Multiple containers are handled by Pods to run a host machine and share other resources like networking, container runtime information, and storage. 

With Kubernetes architecture, we can enable a single administrator to manage thousands of containers running simultaneously.  It is also helpful in Workload portability and orchestration of containers for on-site deployments to clouds (public or private) and to hybrid deployments. 

What are the benefits of Kubernetes?

Free and Open Source

Kubernetes is open-source software and free platform, initially developed by Google, and now under the charter of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). 

Scalability

Kubernetes offer you the ability to run containers on one or more public cloud, almost anywhere. As Kubernetes has changed the fundamental way of development, teams can also scale faster with the current situation. Based on the application requirement you can use the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler for changing the number of containers based on usage metrics.

Self-Healing

Sometimes containers can fail due to a variety of reasons. Kubernetes restarts the failed, unresponsive, and killing containers and keeps healthy deployments.  This is helpful as a mitigation action for failed containers. 

Portability

Kubernetes offers faster, simpler, and more portable deployment times. So it is advantageous for multiple cloud providers where they can increase the number of containers without re-architecting their infrastructure.

In short, Kubernetes gives instant credibility and releases new features regularly. After the Kubernetes introduction, you can safely work with orchestrators efficiently and over the coming years, every popular public cloud provider is managing Kubernetes services. Due to Kubernetes’ huge uptake and adoption, the demand and usage for Kubernetes will grow exponentially.