Glossary Platform
Kubernetes
Kubernetes is a container orchestration platform that schedules containers across a cluster and manages rollout, service discovery, scaling, and recovery.
Kubernetes runs containerised workloads across a cluster of machines. You give it manifests that describe pods, deployments, services, secrets, config, and storage. Kubernetes then works to keep the running system close to that description.
It handles useful but fiddly work: restarting failed containers, rolling out new versions, placing workloads on nodes, exposing services, and scaling replicas.
The cost is complexity. Kubernetes gives you a lot of control, but it also gives you new failure modes. A small app that fits comfortably in Docker Compose does not become better just because it has YAML with apiVersion at the top.