Kubernetes
An open-source system developed by Google for automating the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications across massive clusters of servers.
What it is
While Docker runs containers, Kubernetes orchestrates them at an enterprise scale. It acts as an automated data center manager. If a container crashes, Kubernetes restarts it; if traffic spikes, Kubernetes spins up identical clones; it balances network traffic and manages storage automatically across hundreds of physical machines to ensure zero downtime.
When you would use it
You use Kubernetes when your application is too large or complex for simple PaaS hosting and requires highly resilient, auto-scaling infrastructure across a cluster of servers.
Common operations
- Scaling a microservice architecture to handle millions of global users.
- Performing zero-downtime rolling updates of enterprise applications.