Overview [page]deterministic

This page is an overview of Kubernetes.

The name Kubernetes originates from Greek, meaning helmsman or pilot. K8s as an abbreviation results from counting the eight letters between the "K" and the "s". Google open sourced the Kubernetes project in 2014. Kubernetes combines [over 15 years of Google's experience](/blog/2015/04/borg-predecessor-to-kubernetes/) running production workloads at scale with best-of-breed ideas and practices from the community.

## Why you need Kubernetes and what it can do {#why-you-need-kubernetes-and-what-can-it-do}

Containers are a good way to bundle and run your applications. In a production environment, you need to manage the containers that run the applications and ensure that there is no downtime. For example, if a container goes down, another container needs to start. Wouldn't it be easier if this behavior was handled by a system?

That's how Kubernetes comes to the rescue! Kubernetes provides you with a framework to run distributed systems resiliently. It takes care of scaling and failover for your application, provides deployment patterns, and more. For example: Kubernetes can easily manage a canary deployment for your system.

Kubernetes provides you with:

* Service discovery and load balancing Kubernetes can expose a container using a DNS name or its own IP address. If traffic to a container is high, Kubernetes is able to load balance and distribute the network traffic so that the deployment is stable. * Storage orchestration Kubernetes allows you to automatically mount a storage system of your choice, such as local storage, public cloud providers, and more. * Automated rollouts and rollbacks You can describe the desired state for your deployed containers using Kubernetes, and it can change the actual state to the desired state at a controlled rate. For example, you can automate Kubernetes to create new containers for your deployment, remove existing containers and adopt all their resources to the new container. * Automatic bin packing You provide Kubernetes with a cluster of nodes that it can use to run containerized tasks. You tell Kubernetes how much CPU and memory (RAM) each container needs. Kubernetes can fit containers onto your nodes to make the best use of your resources. * Self-healing Kubernetes restarts containers that fail, replaces containers, kills containers that don't respond to your user-defined health check, and doesn't advertise them to clients until they are ready to serve. * Secret and configuration management Kubernetes lets you store and manage sensitive information, such as passwords, OAuth tokens, and SSH keys. You can deploy and update secrets and application configuration without rebuilding your container images, and without exposing secrets in your stack configuration. * Batch execution In addition to services, Kubernetes can manage your batch and CI workloads, replacing containers that fail, if desired. * Horizontal scaling Scale your application up and down with a simple command, with a UI, or automatically based on CPU usage. * IPv4/IPv6 dual-stack Allocation of IPv4 and IPv6 addresses to Pods and Services. * Designed for extensibility Add features to your Kubernetes cluster without changing upstream source code.

## What Kubernetes is not

Kubernetes is not a traditional, all-inclusive PaaS (Platform as a Service) system. Since Kubernetes operates at the container level rather than at the hardware level, it provides some generally applicable features common to PaaS offerings, such as deployment, scaling, load balancing, and lets users integrate their logging, monitoring, and alerting solutions. However, Kubernetes is not monolithic, and these default solutions are optional and pluggable. Kubernetes provides the building blocks for building developer platforms, but preserves user choice and flexibility where it is important.

Kubernetes:

* Does not limit the types of a …(trimmed)