Kubernetes

Kubernetes (often shortened to "k8s") is a container orchestration system, originally designed by Google and now maintained by the open-source Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). It's the #5 most-used dev tool in the world, reported in roughly 28.5% of developer surveys, and it's the industry standard for running containers — typically Docker containers — reliably in production. Teams use it because it automatically deploys, scales, restarts, and load-balances applications across a cluster of machines, with no manual babysitting required.

Example

A Kubernetes Deployment manifest declares how many copies (replicas) of a container should run, and Kubernetes keeps that number running automatically.

# deployment.yaml
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: my-app
spec:
  replicas: 3
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: my-app
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: my-app
    spec:
      containers:
        - name: my-app
          image: my-app:latest
          ports:
            - containerPort: 3000

# apply the manifest to the cluster
kubectl apply -f deployment.yaml

# check the running pods
kubectl get pods

Getting started

Run a lightweight local cluster with Minikube or kind to learn without needing a cloud account.

# install Minikube, then start a local cluster
minikube start

# confirm kubectl can talk to the cluster
kubectl get nodes