Kubernetes: Container Orchestration Explained
Kubernetes (K8s) is the industry-standard platform for managing containerised applications at scale. Where Docker packages and runs individual containers, Kubernetes orchestrates many containers across many servers — handling deployment, scaling, self-healing, networking, and configuration management.
What Kubernetes Does
- Scheduling: Places containers on the right servers based on available resources and requirements
- Auto-scaling: Adds or removes container instances based on load (Horizontal Pod Autoscaler) and scales the underlying node pool based on total demand
- Self-healing: Automatically restarts failed containers, replaces unhealthy instances, and reschedules containers from failed nodes
- Service discovery and load balancing: Routes traffic between container instances automatically
- Rolling updates and rollbacks: Deploys new versions gradually, rolls back automatically if health checks fail
- Configuration and secrets management: Separates configuration from code, stores sensitive values securely
When We Use Kubernetes
Kubernetes is most appropriate for: applications with complex scaling requirements, microservices architectures with many services, teams that need fine-grained deployment control, and systems that need to maximise infrastructure utilisation. For simpler applications, managed container services (AWS ECS, Google Cloud Run) offer similar benefits with less operational overhead.
Managed Kubernetes Services
- Amazon EKS: AWS managed Kubernetes
- Google GKE: Google's managed Kubernetes — generally considered the most mature managed K8s
- Azure AKS: Azure managed Kubernetes