What Is Kubernetes?

We’ve emphasized how tough it was deploying applications without containers and discussed a little about Docker. Next, we’ll look at what makes containers easier to use over deploying without them, and why the tool for such a purpose is Kubernetes. Kubernetes was originally designed by Google in 2014. It’s open-sourced and has gathered a large community of contributors who have worked on various versions of it to date. The community ensures that there’s a release of a Kubernetes version every four months, making it approximately three releases per year.

Kubernetes

Kubernetes is an open-source orchestration tool that manages containers. It scales and monitors applications that run on it. It’s called an orchestration tool because it allows the building of application services on many containers, enabling easy scaling and management of their health. Kubernetes is also known by the “K8s” acronym.

Kubernetes architecture

Kubernetes has what we call a cluster. A cluster can be described as a building that houses all of Kubernetes’ resources. Going further, we’ll look at the resources within the cluster and how they function.

• Node: A node is a worker machine responsible for carrying loads on the cluster. They are of two types, the controller and worker nodes. The controller node houses the main components API server, which run activities such as scheduling loads to the worker nodes, and they also manage them. Every Node has a container runtime and kubelet. The nodes also house the pods that run the application.

• Pods: A pod is the smallest unit in Kubernetes. They create a layer on top of containers and run one ...