Kubernetes

An open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.

Kubernetes (often abbreviated as K8s) is an open-source container orchestration platform originally developed by Google and now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). It automates the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications across clusters of machines.

Kubernetes organizes containers into pods (the smallest deployable units), manages them through deployments and services, and provides built-in mechanisms for load balancing, service discovery, storage orchestration, automated rollouts and rollbacks, and self-healing. Configuration is declarative, typically defined in YAML files that describe the desired state of the system.

While serverless platforms abstract away infrastructure management entirely, Kubernetes and serverless can be complementary. Some organizations run backend microservices on Kubernetes while using a serverless API gateway to handle edge routing, authentication, and rate limiting. Kubernetes-based API gateway solutions like Kong and Ambassador also exist for teams that prefer to manage their gateway infrastructure within their Kubernetes clusters.