What is Kubernetes? | Ubuntu

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Kubernetes, or k8s for short, is an open source platform pioneered by Google, which started as a simple container orchestration tool but has grown into a cloud native platform.
It's one of the most significant advancements in IT since the public cloud came to being in 2009, and has already exceeded the 50% of overall adoption among the enterprise.
Container orchestration is about managing the lifecycle of containers, particularly in large, dynamic environments. It automates the deployment, networking, scaling, and availability of containerized workloads and services.
Running containers – which are lightweight and usually ephemeral by nature – in small numbers, is easy enough to be done manually. However, managing them at scale in production environments can be a significant challenge without the automation that container orchestration platforms offer.
Kubernetes has become the standard for container orchestration in the enterprise world.
Improved maintenance, monitoring, and automation
Modernizing infrastructure
Faster time to market
A Kubernetes cluster is what you get when you deploy Kubernetes on physical or virtual machines. It consists of two types of machines:
Every cluster has at least one worker, and the control plane services can be located on the single machine. In production environments, there is typically a large number of workers, depending on the number of containers to be run, and the control plane is distributed across multiple machines for high-availability and fault-tolerance purposes.
Kubernetes is popular for its appealing architecture, a large and active community and the continuous need for extensibility that enables countless development teams to deliver and maintain software at scale by automating container orchestration.
Kubernetes maps out how applications should work and interact with other applications. Due to its elasticity, it can scale services up and down as required, perform rolling updates, switch traffic between different versions of your applications to test features, or rollback problematic deployments.
Kubernetes has emerged as a leading choice for organizations looking to build their multi-cloud environments. All public clouds have adopted Kubernetes and offer their own distributions, such as AWS Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes, Google Kubernetes Engine and Azure Kubernetes Service.
Kubernetes (from the Greek ‘κυβερνήτης’ meaning 'helmsman') was originally developed by Google. Kubernetes' design has been heavily influenced by Google's 'Borg' project – a similar system used by Google to run much of its infrastructure. Kubernetes has since been donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), a collaborative project between the Linux Foundation and Google, Cisco, IBM, Docker, Microsoft, AWS and VMware.
Kubernetes is a platform for running your applications and services. It manages the full lifecycle of container-based applications, by automating tasks, controlling resources, and abstracting infrastructure. Enterprises adopt Kubernetes to cut down operational costs, reduce time-to-market, and transform their business. Developers like container-based development, as it helps break up monolithic applications into more maintainable microservices. Kubernetes allows their work to move seamlessly from development to production, and results in faster-time-to-market for business applications.
Kubernetes works by:
The European Space Agency modernized its infrastructure with Canonical Kubernetes
Find out why ESA chose Canonical to implement a new, dynamic platform for efficient, automated, and fast deployment of systems across their missions.
OneUptime takes back its servers and saves $352,500 a year with Canonical infrastructure solutions
Migrating to bare metal infrastructure using Canonical's open source technologies allowed monitoring services provider OneUptime to have greater control over its infrastructure and services – while saving over 76% of their cloud costs.
Kubernetes enables configuration, automation and management capabilities around containers. It has a vast tooling ecosystem and can address complex use cases, and this is the reason why many mistake it for a traditional Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).
Kubernetes, as opposed to PaaS, does not:
Kubernetes enables configuration, automation and management capabilities around containers. It has a vast tooling ecosystem and can address complex use cases, and this is the reason why many mistake it for a traditional Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). Kubernetes, as opposed to PaaS, does not:
Kubernetes works by joining a group of physical or virtual host machines, referred to as “nodes”, into a cluster. This creates a “supercomputer” to run containerized applications with a greater processing speed, more storage capacity, and increased network capabilities than any single machine would have on its own. The nodes include all necessary services to run “pods”, which in turn run single or multiple containers. A pod corresponds to a single instance of an application in Kubernetes.
One (or more for larger clusters, or High Availability) node of the cluster is designated as the “control plane”. The control plane node then assumes responsibility for the cluster as the orchestration layer – scheduling and allocating tasks to the “worker” nodes in a way which optimises the resources of the cluster. All administrative and operational tasks on the cluster are done through the control plane, whether these are changes to the configuration, executing or terminating