20 Facts About Kubernetes

Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration system for automating software deployment, scaling, and management.

Originally, it interfaced exclusively with the Docker runtime through a "Dockershim"; however, from November 2020 up to April 2022, Kubernetes has deprecated the shim in favor of directly interfacing with the container through Containerd, or replacing Docker with a runtime that is compliant with the Container Runtime Interface.

On March 6,2018, Kubernetes Project reached ninth place in the list of GitHub projects by the number of commits, and second place in authors and issues, after the Linux kernel.

Kubernetes defines a set of building blocks that collectively provide mechanisms that deploy, maintain, and scale applications based on CPU, memory or custom metrics.

Kubernetes is loosely coupled and extensible to meet different workloads.

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The components of Kubernetes can be divided into those that manage an individual node and those that are part of the control plane.

Kubernetes master is the main controlling unit of the cluster, managing its workload and directing communication across the system.

Kubernetes provides a partitioning of the resources it manages into non-overlapping sets called namespaces.

Basic scheduling unit in Kubernetes is a pod, which consists of one or more containers that are guaranteed to be co-located on the same node.

Each pod in Kubernetes is assigned a unique IP address within the cluster, allowing applications to use ports without the risk of conflict.

ReplicaSets can be said to be a grouping mechanism that lets Kubernetes maintain the number of instances that have been declared for a given pod.

Kubernetes service is a set of pods that work together, such as one tier of a multi-tier application.

Kubernetes provides two modes of service discovery, using environmental variables or using Kubernetes DNS.

Kubernetes provides two closely related mechanisms to deal with this need: "configmaps" and "secrets", both of which allow for configuration changes to be made without requiring an application build.

Recent versions of Kubernetes have introduced support for encryption to be used as well.

Kubernetes enables clients to attach keys called "labels" to any API object in the system, such as pods and nodes.

Examples of functionality delivered by custom resource definitions or by Kubernetes itself include retry logic, delivered by Kubernetes itself, and the creation and maintenance of an inventory of available storage media and volumes, typically delivered via a custom resource definition.

The provider implementation consists of cloud-provider specific functions that let Kubernetes provide the cluster API in a fashion that is well-integrated with the cloud-provider's services and resources.

Kubernetes is commonly used as a way to host a microservice-based implementation, because it and its associated ecosystem of tools provide all the capabilities needed to address key concerns of any microservice architecture.

Various vendors offer Kubernetes-based platforms or infrastructure as a service that deploy Kubernetes.