Definition. An open source orchestration system for containerised applications. Kubernetes schedules containers onto machines, maintains the desired state, scales horizontally and provides building blocks for networking, storage, configuration and secrets. Applications are described declaratively as objects (Deployment, Service, Ingress, …).

Why it matters. For mid-sized platforms, Kubernetes is rarely an end in itself but a consequence. As soon as several applications, environments or domains have to run reliably, the alternative is usually a less well documented in-house construction.

Related. Kubernetes Worker Node, Platform Engineering, GitOps, Cluster Autoscaler