Kubernetes is a portable, extensible, open source platform for managing containerized workloads and services, facilitating both declarative configuration and automation. Kubernetes was developed by Google, and the first committer after Google was Red Hat.

Kubernetes manages application integrity, replicates load balancing, and allocates hardware resources. One of the fundamental tasks of Kubernetes is the work of maintaining an application, making it work, and responding to all user requests. Apps that become unhealthy or do not complete the health check that you decide for them can be flushed automatically. Another advantage offered by Kubernetes is maximizing the use of hardware resources, including the memory, storage, and network bandwidth. Applications can have varying limits regarding the use of resources. Many apps that use minimal resources can be grouped together in the same hardware, while apps that need the resources to grow can instead be placed in systems where they have enough space to evolve. Also, the actions of deploying updates through members of clusters and executing rollback if the updates have issues can be automated.

Kubernetes Helm graphs facilitate the deployment of preconfigured applications. Package managers, such as the APT of Debian Linux and PIP of Python, can help the user to install and configure an application. This is particularly useful when an application has more external dependencies. Helm is a sort of package manager for Kubernetes. Many software applications must be performed to be multiple containers and grouped in Kubernetes. Helm provides a mechanism, a so called chart, such that a given piece of software being executed as a container group within Kubernetes. You can create your own Helm charts, and you may need to if you are building a custom app to be distributed internally. However, if you're deploying an application using a popular distribution model with a common one, there's a good probability that someone has already created a Helm chart that's ready to use; it may be published on https://kubeapps.com/.

Kubernetes simplifies storage management and other resources for applications. The containers are designed to be immutable; anything that you ship with a container should never change. However, applications need a reliable way to manage external storage volumes. This is an even more complicated scenario, wherein containers run, die (probably crash), and restart throughout the life of an application. Kubernetes has abstractions to allow for an email application container to manage the storage space in the same decoupled method of other resources. You can access many archiving types of storage, from Amazon EBS volumes to the simple NFS shares, through the Kubernetes storage drivers, called volumes. Most of the time, volumes are associated with a specific pod, but a volume subtype, called the persistent volume, can be used for data that needs to live independently of any pod. Containers often need to work with so-called secrets (credentials such as PAI tokens). While there are third-party solutions for such credentials, like Docker secrets and HashiCorp Vault, Kubernetes has its own mechanism to manage secrets natively.

Kubernetes can be implemented in hybrid and multicloud environments. One of the ambitious goals of the cloud is the possibility to run any application in any cloud environment, or in any combination of public and private cloud. This is not just to avoid supplier lock-in, but is also meant to take advantage of the specific features of individual clouds. Kubernetes provides a set of primitives, well-known federation to keep synchronized clusters between multiple site and multiple cloud regions. For example, it may be a certain distribution of the app, kept consistent between multiple bunches. Clusters and diversification can share service discovery so that a cluster backend resource can be accessed by anyone. The federation can also be used to create high availability or fault-tolerant Kubernetes distributions, regardless of the fact that you are moving in multiple cloud environments.

Nonetheless, as described previously, Kubernetes introduces a lot of new concepts and abstractions, which gives the user a high learning curve. For that reason, we don't want you to spend too much time learning the command-line tools for it; rather, you should switch directly to the enterprise-level software that integrates and uses the Kubernetes API, in order to provide an efficient and easy to use platform, such as OpenShift.