Kubernetes
Orchestrating containerised applications across clusters of machines
Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration platform developed by Google and now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. It automates the deployment, scaling, and operational management of containerised applications by abstracting the underlying cluster of machines into a single compute pool. Engineers define workloads as Pods, Deployments, Services, and ConfigMaps in YAML manifests; Kubernetes schedules these across available nodes, restarts failed containers, routes traffic to healthy instances, and scales replicas up or down based on load. Kubernetes is the dominant platform for running containerised production workloads and is the foundation of managed services such as AWS EKS, Google GKE, and Azure AKS. It is a baseline expectation in cloud engineering, platform engineering, and DevOps roles at mid-to-senior level.
Official Website
Kubernetes official site →Pricing
View pricing →Certification
Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) (+ CKAD and CKS tracks)Kubernetes Use Cases
- Deploying containerised microservices across a cluster with automated scheduling, health checking, and self-healing restart behaviour
- Scaling application replicas up and down in response to CPU and memory metrics using the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler
- Managing rolling updates and rollbacks for application deployments with configurable availability constraints during the transition
- Isolating workloads and controlling network traffic between services using Kubernetes namespaces and NetworkPolicy resources
- Configuring persistent storage, secrets, and environment-specific configuration for stateful applications running inside the cluster
Kubernetes Learning Resources
The official Kubernetes documentation at kubernetes.io/docs covers cluster architecture, workload management, and configuration in full. Kubernetes' interactive tutorial at kubernetes.io/docs/tutorials/kubernetes-basics runs in a browser-based environment without requiring a local cluster.