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Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration platform originally developed by Google and released in 2014, now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). It automates the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications across clusters of machines. At its core, Kubernetes abstracts away the underlying infrastructure, allowing operators to declare a desired state for their applications — such as how many instances should run, how they should communicate, and what resources they need — and then continuously works to maintain that state. The system is organized around a control plane, which handles scheduling and cluster-wide decision-making, and worker nodes, which are the machines that actually run application workloads inside units called Pods.

Kubernetes provides a rich set of primitives for managing complex application lifecycles. Features such as rolling updates and rollbacks allow teams to deploy new versions of software with minimal downtime, while built-in health checks and self-healing mechanisms automatically restart or replace containers that fail. It includes abstractions for networking (Services), configuration (ConfigMaps and Secrets), persistent storage (Persistent Volumes), and workload types ranging from stateless web servers (Deployments) to stateful databases (StatefulSets) and batch jobs. This breadth of functionality has made Kubernetes the de facto standard for running containerized workloads in production environments, though it comes with significant operational complexity and a steep learning curve for teams adopting it for the first time.