This is first of a series of bite sized posts about Kubernetes technology in simple terms, targeted for beginners, especially for application developers. Here we don't focus much on Kubernetes cluster administration.

Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration platform.

Container is an virtually isolated application process along with its runtime environment. Container is created from its image.

Container image is a portable bundle of an application along with all its runtime dependencies.

Container orchestration is managing containers workloads at large scale, with the help of container runtimes. Some examples of container orchestration platforms are Kubernetes, Docker Swarm and Hashicorp Nomad.

Container runtime is service that manages execution lifecycle of the containers. Examples of container runtimes are CRI-O, Dockerd, Containerd, etc..

Why Kubernetes?

• Automatically brings current state of the application workload to desired state of deployment.
• Efficiently allocate resources to application workloads.
• It can horizontal scale itself as well as the application work loads.
• It can automatically recover the applications from node failures.
• It has builtin components for service discovery and load balancing.
• Provides networking with both IPv4 and IPv6.
• Provides storage abstractions which can be backed by various types of storage systems such as EBS, EFS, FSx, S3, and more..
• Offers builtin Secret and configuration management.
• Supports Batch execution workloads.
• It is extensible though plugins.