Simply put, Kubernetes is an open-source system for orchestrating and managing container-based work and services, such as applications.

According to the definition given by the official kubernetes.io website, the system facilitates both declarative configuration and automation. Also known as "K8s," the system "groups containers that make up an application into logical units for easier management and service discovery".

What are containers?

To avoid confusing concepts, let's get clear: what are containers?

Containers are executable units of software in which an application's code is clustered, along with its libraries and dependencies, in simple ways.

By doing this, the code can run on a desktop, on traditional information technology, or in the cloud. Thus, containers make an application portable and easy to transfer from one environment to another.

Containers are preferred over virtual machines because of their ability to provide abstraction and resource isolation. The latter contains an extra layer of hardware, making them heavy, complex, and less mobile.

Why should you use Kubernetes?

Containers are suitable to cluster and run applications. They can be perceived as the collection of one or more processes organized in isolation from the system. Here is where Kubernetes comes in and why you should use them.

Created by Google, which in 2014 made Kubernetes an open-source project, K8s makes it easy to automate container operations, eliminating much of the manual processes of container deployment and scaling.

According to the official website, According to the official website, Kubernetes "provides a framework for running distributed systems in a resilient manner," taking care of the "scaling and recovery in times of failure" of an application and providing "deployment patterns."

Advantages of using Kubernetes

As we've seen, K8s facilitate several processes. The advantages are numerous, but the project that runs large-scale workloads stands out for features such as:

• Automated operations: by having built-in commands to handle much of the denser work of application management, allowing you to automate day-to-day operations;
• Infrastructure abstraction: once installed, Kubernetes handles compute, network and storage. This feature frees developers from underlying application tasks;
• Service health monitoring: K8s continuously performs health checks on services, restarting containers that fail or stop. In addition, it replaces and/or deletes containers that do not respond to the user-defined integrity check;
• Automatic binary packing: by providing Kubernetes with a cluster of nodes, it performs tasks on the containers. It gives K8s information about the CPU and memory (RAM) needed for each container. Kubernetes can fit the containers on the nodes, optimizing the use of resources.

Therefore, you should use Kubernetes because it gives developers more freedom, makes it easier to scale applications, keeps the code operational, and speeds up the delivery process.

Remember that K8s is not a traditional, full-featured PaaS (platform-as-a-service) system since it does not operate at the hardware level. Kubernetes is a set of primitives that lends itself well to building PaaS tools.

Kubernetes provides the building blocks for building development platforms but preserves user choice and flexibility where it matters.

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