What Is Kubernetes?

Distributed Services with Go — by Travis Jeffery (71 / 84)

👈 Chapter 10 Deploy Applications with Kubernetes Locally | TOC | Install kubectl 👉

While entire books are devoted to answering this question, even they can’t cover everything Kubernetes can do. For our purposes in this book, I will touch upon the information you need to know to have a working knowledge of Kubernetes, enough to continue our journey and deploy and operate our service. Why Kubernetes? Kubernetes is ubiquitous, it’s available on all cloud platforms, and it’s as close to a standard as we have for deploying distributed services.

Kubernetes[53] is an open source orchestration system for automating deployment, scaling, and operating services running in containers. You tell Kubernetes what to do by using its REST API to create, update, and delete resources that Kubernetes knows how to handle. Kubernetes is a declarative system in that you describe the end-goal state you want and Kubernetes runs the changes to take your system from its current state to your end-goal state.

The Kubernetes resource that people most commonly see are pods, the smallest deployable unit in Kubernetes. Think of containers as processes and pods as hosts — all containers running in a pod share the same network namespace, the same IP address, and the same interprocess communication (IPC) namespace, and they can share the same volumes. These are logical hosts because a physical host (what Kubernetes calls a node) may run…