Kubernetes is a software platform to deploy services in production for different clients, both for large companies and start-ups.
A portable, open-source platform that allows you to manage both services and workloads.
It is a container-centric management environment with a storage and networking infrastructure able to free up user workloads.
Docker created a system that allows to easily deploying applications on any type of machine. What Kubernetes has achieved is a platform for deploying containerized, but production-ready applications, ensuring the security and availability of applications in multiple ways. We will examine it throughout this article.
In short, Kubernetes is a layer “above Docker” that offers standards and tools to facilitate the effective deployment of applications.
Lifting a Docker container is relatively simple, but lifting multiple coordinated replicas that are resistant to errors on machines or on the network, that are updated without losing the capacity of services, etc., is more complicated. Thanks to Kubernetes, all this can be done easily.
Kubernetes starts from the experience of the Google system in cutting Borg containers, which has been in production for more than 15 years running all Google services.
How did Kubernetes come about?
The first version of Kubernetes was released to the public in 2015. Since then the project has grown a lot thanks to the Open Source community. Today a large number of companies contribute to the development of Kubernetes, being in total more than 2,400 individual collaborators. In this way a huge ecosystem of tools has been created around Kubernetes and many of these projects are managed, along with Kubernetes itself, through the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
As a curiosity, Kubernetes in Greek means “ancient helmsman”, that is, the one who controls the ship that transports the containers.
