What is Kubernetes and Why Should You Care?

Container management is gaining popularity, but what is it exactly?

When it comes to container orchestration engines, Kubernetes seems to be the top dog

Kubernetes (pronounced “koo-burr-NET-eez”) is probably the most popular container orchestration engine out there. A natural follow-up question is: “what the hell is a container and what does container orchestration mean?”

Containers are, at a basic level, individual lightweight standalone packages of software that include everything that this software need to run. Containers are what evolved from virtual machines, and the effectiveness of containerized software lies in the fact that it is standard and can run on any infrastructure.

Container orchestration is the process by which one deploys and manages these individual containers. There are several popular tools othere, like Docker Swarm, Mesos/Marathon, and others as well, but Kubernetes is slowly becoming the go-to container orchestration engine.

Why Should You Care About Kubernetes?

• It is one of the most popular projects on Github, and gets the most activity
• It has a huge active community, so whatever issue you might run into, someone out there might be able to help
• It was developed by Google
• It supports a wide spectrum of languages, including Spring and Java, .NET and .NET Core, Go, Ruby and more
• It is superb at scaling

With that being said, Kubernetes is not necessarily a straightforward tool. Installation instructions might be different for each OS and the setup is a little complex for the beginner.

A great place to start is their official tutorials and their user guide.

Originally published at moneerrifai.com.