Kubernetes can run application containers on clusters of physical or virtual machines.
It can also do much more than that.
Kubernetes satisfies a number of common needs of applications running in production, such as co-locating helper processes, mounting storage systems, distributing secrets, application health checking, replicating application instances, horizontal auto-scaling, load balancing, rolling updates, and resource monitoring.
However, even though Kubernetes provides a lot of functionality, there are always new scenarios that would benefit from new features. Ad hoc orchestration that is acceptable initially often requires robust automation at scale. Application-specific workflows can be streamlined to accelerate developer velocity.
This is why Kubernetes was also designed to serve as a platform for building an ecosystem of components and tools to make it easier to deploy, scale, and manage applications. The Kubernetes control plane is built upon the same APIs that are available to developers and users, implementing resilient control loops that continuously drive the current state towards the desired state. This design has enabled Apache Stratos and a number of other Platform as a Service and Continuous Integration and Deployment systems to build atop Kubernetes.
This presentation introduces Kubernetes’s core primitives, shows how some of its better known features are built on them, and introduces some of the new capabilities that are being added.