What Does Kubernetes Do?
Kubernetes is a popular open-source container orchestration platform that automates the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. It provides a way to manage and organize containers, which are lightweight and portable units of software that can run anywhere. It ensures that these container workloads are running efficiently and scaling seamlessly as needed.
Kubernetes provides a number of critical capabilities for cloud native applications, including:
- Scalability and flexibility. Kubernetes makes it easy to scale applications up or down based on demand. It can automatically adjust the number of replicas based on metrics such as CPU and memory usage, ensuring that resources are used efficiently. Kubernetes also allows you to deploy applications to any environment, whether it’s on-premises, in the cloud, or a hybrid environment.
- Automation and resource optimization. Kubernetes automates many tasks related to managing containers, such as rolling updates and self-healing. It also optimizes resource usage by scheduling containers based on available resources and ensuring that containers are evenly distributed across nodes.
- High availability and fault tolerance. Kubernetes ensures that applications are highly available by automatically restarting failed containers and rescheduling them to healthy nodes. It also provides features such as load balancing and automatic failover, making it easier to build resilient applications.
While Kubernetes offers basic networking connectivity to workloads, service mesh provides a dedicated platform for application connectivity both within a Kubernetes cluster and across multiple clusters with features such as traffic management, service discovery, load balancing, security and observability.
For more information, read our in-depth articles on Kubernetes: