An Introduction to Kubernetes
Published: 2021-12-24 22:50:46

**What exactly is Kubernetes?**

Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration technology that facilitates the operation of a cloud application's elastic web server infrastructure. Kubernetes can be used to facilitate data center outsourcing to public cloud service providers or for large-scale web hosting. Websites and mobile apps with complicated bespoke code may use Kubernetes to deploy on commodity hardware, lowering the cost of web server provisioning with public cloud hosts and optimizing software development procedures.
At its most fundamental, Kubernetes is a framework for executing and coordinating containerized applications across a cluster of servers. It is a platform meant to manage the whole life cycle of containerized applications and services by utilizing approaches that enable predictability, scalability, and high availability.

**Kubernetes Features**

Kubernetes has the capability of automating web server deployment based on the amount of web traffic in production. Web server hardware can be placed in various data centers, on various hardware, or through various hosting companies. Kubernetes scales up web servers based on software application demand, then degrades web server instances during downtimes. In addition, Kubernetes provides strong load balancing features for delivering web traffic to web servers in operations.

**Kubernetes architecture and how it works?**

Kubernetes emerged from the technology used by Google's "Borg" platform to operate its data centers at scale. With the introduction of the EC2 platform, AWS made elastic web server frameworks available to the general public. Kubernetes enables businesses to orchestrate containers in the same way that EC2 does, but with open source technology. Kubernetes support for cloud web server orchestration is available from Google, AWS, Azure, and the other main public cloud providers. Kubernetes can be used for entire data center outsourcing, online/mobile apps, SaaS support, cloud web hosting, or high-performance computing by customers.

**Kubernetes terminology**

Kubernetes (also known as "K8s") is a project of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which promotes the establishment of standardized networking standards in cloud data center management software. Docker is the most widely used container virtualization protocol in Kubernetes. Docker provides programming teams with integrated software lifecycle development tools. RancherOS, CoreOS, and Alpine Linux are well-known container-optimized operating systems. Container virtualization differs from VM or VPS technologies that use hypervisors in that it often necessitates a smaller operating system footprint in production.

**Kubernetes advantages**

The key advantage of Kubernetes is the ability to run an automated, elastic web server platform in production without having to rely on AWS's EC2 service. Kubernetes works on the majority of public cloud hosting services, and all of the main providers have comparable pricing. Kubernetes makes it possible to completely outsource a company data center. Kubernetes may also be used in production to scale web and mobile apps to the greatest levels of web traffic. Kubernetes enables any organization to run its software code at the same degree of scalability as the world's top corporations on competitive data center hardware cost.

**What is container orchestration?**

Container orchestration is the administration of individual web servers running in containers via virtual partitions on data center hardware. Container orchestration is a method of automating the maintenance of an elastic architecture for web servers in a data center. Administrators can configure resources to start automatically if web traffic exceeds the capacity of a single server. This can scale to handle millions of concurrent users for SaaS applications.

**Kubernetes vs. Docker**

Kubernetes is a container orchestration tool that is open source. Docker is the most widely used container virtualization standard alongside Kubernetes. Docker Swarm, CoreOS Tectonic, and Mesosphere are some more elastic web server orchestration technologies. Intel also offers a container standard called Kata, and there are various Linux container variants. Docker controls the majority of the container virtualization market for software products. Docker is a software development firm that specializes on container virtualization, whereas Kubernetes is an open-source project supported by a coder community that comprises professional programmers from all of the major IT firms.