Overview
Kubernetes (, K8s) is an open-source container orchestration system for automating software deployment, scaling, and management. Originally designed by Google, the project is now maintained by a worldwide community of contributors, and the trademark is held by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
The name Kubernetes originates from Ancient Greek, meaning āhelmsmanā or āpilotā. Kubernetes is often abbreviated as K8s, counting the eight letters between the K and the s (a numeronym).
Kubernetes assembles one or more computers, either virtual machines or bare metal, into a cluster which can run workloads in containers. It works with various container runtimes, such as containerd and CRI-O. Its suitability for running and managing workloads of all sizes and styles has led to its widespread adoption in clouds and data centers. There are multiple distributions of this platform ā from independent software vendors (ISVs) as well as hosted-on-cloud offerings from all the major public cloud vendors.
Kubernetes is one of the most widely deployed software systems in the world being used across companies including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Nvidia, Reddit, Pinterest and thousands of other companies.