Kubernetes is a portable, extensible, open-source platform for managing containerized workloads and services. It facilitates both declarative configuration and automation. It has a large and rapidly growing ecosystem. Google made Kubernetes an Open Source project in 2014. Kubernetes builds on a decade and a half of experience of Google, running production workloads on a large scale, combined with the best ideas and practices of the community.
Containerization
Kubernetes provides a container-centric management environment. It coordinates compute, networking and storage infrastructure on behalf of user workloads. This provides much of the simplicity of Platform as a Service (PaaS) with the flexibility of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and enables portability between infrastructure providers.
The old way of deploying applications was to install them on a host using the operating system package manager. This had the disadvantage that application executables, configurations, libraries, and lifecycles were intertwined with each other and with the host operating system. One could create unchangeable virtual machine images to achieve predictable rollouts and rollbacks, but VMs are heavyweight and non-portable.
The New Way is to deploy containers at the operating system level rather than hardware virtualization. These containers are isolated from each other and from the host: they have their own file systems, they cannot see each other's processes, and their resource consumption can be limited. They are easier to create than VMs, and because they are decoupled from the underlying infrastructure and host file system, they are portable across Clouds and OS distributions.
Planet
Scale
Kubernetes is based on the same principles that enable Google to run billions of containers per week.
Never
Outgrow
Whether you're testing locally or running a global enterprise, Kubernetes' flexibility grows with you to deliver your applications consistently and easily, regardless of the complexity of requirements.
Run
Anywhere
Kubernetes is Open Source and gives users the freedom to use on-premises, hybrid or public Cloud infrastructure. This way, you can easily move workloads to wherever you want.