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What Is Kubernetes?

Kubernetes, also known as K8s, is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.

-- The Kubernetes team

Kubernetes orchestrates and manages collections of containers (often using container runtimes like containerd). It takes care of scaling, distribution, and connectivity among these containers. Think of it as a system to manage many containers and the infrastructure they run on.

For example, you could install Docker on a single server, and route traffic directly to it. That's fairly simple to set up, but what if you want 10 instances of that server? What about 1000 instances? What if you want to deploy many different services, each scaling up with more instances depending on load? Those are the problems that Kubernetes solves.

-- Source: Dilbert comic

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