What is Kubernetes? Container orchestration explained
Kubernetes is an open-source platform that automates deploying, scaling, and managing containerised applications. Learn what problems it solves and why it has become the industry standard.
3 lessons · 10 min · Beginner
Written by
Marketing Team at Civo
Written by
Marketing Team at Civo
Running a single container is straightforward. Running thousands of containers across dozens of machines, keeping them healthy, scaling them up under load, and updating them without downtime is a different problem entirely. Kubernetes solves that problem.
Kubernetes (often abbreviated as K8s) is an open-source platform that automates the deployment, scaling, and management of containerised applications. It was originally developed at Google, where it shares DNA with Borg and Omega, the internal systems Google used to manage its own infrastructure at scale. It is now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and has become the industry standard for running containers in production.
What Kubernetes actually does
When people ask what Kubernetes does, the answer is a specific set of capabilities:
- Automated rollouts and rollbacks: Deploy a new version of your application and Kubernetes rolls it out gradually, checking health at each step. If something goes wrong, it rolls back automatically.
- Self-healing: If a container crashes, Kubernetes restarts it. If a node fails, Kubernetes reschedules the pods that were running on it to healthy nodes. You do not need to intervene manually.
- Horizontal scaling: Scale your application up or down based on CPU usage, memory, or custom metrics. You can do this manually with a single command or automatically with the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler.
- Service discovery and load balancing: Kubernetes assigns each set of pods a stable DNS name and IP address, and automatically load-balances traffic across healthy pods. You do not need an external load balancer for internal communication.
- Configuration management: Store configuration and secrets separately from your application code using ConfigMaps and Secrets. Update configuration without rebuilding or redeploying your container image.
- Bin packing: Kubernetes schedules containers onto nodes based on their resource requirements, making efficient use of your available compute without manual placement decisions.
Why container orchestration matters
Running a few containers manually is manageable. In production, the picture changes quickly. You might have hundreds of services, each running multiple replicas, across multiple nodes, with rolling deployments happening continuously. Manual management at that scale is not feasible.
A container orchestrator handles the operational work so your team can focus on building applications rather than managing infrastructure. Kubernetes has become the default choice because of its extensibility, its large community of over 100,000 contributors, and its proven stability running production workloads at every scale from small startups to the largest technology companies in the world.
Kubernetes and Civo
Running Kubernetes yourself means installing and maintaining the control plane, managing upgrades, configuring networking, and handling node failures. Civo handles all of that for you. You get a fully managed k3s cluster, which is a CNCF-conformant Kubernetes distribution, ready in under 90 seconds. The infrastructure is managed for you and you interact with it using standard kubectl commands just as you would with any other Kubernetes cluster.
Ready to get started? Continue to the Kubernetes setup chapter
Marketing Team at Civo
Civo is the Sovereign Cloud and AI platform designed to help developers and enterprises build without limits. We bridge the gap between the openness of the public cloud and the rigorous security of private environments, delivering full cloud parity across every deployment. As a team, we are dedicated to providing scalable compute, lightning-fast Kubernetes, and managed services that are ready in minutes. Through CivoStack Enterprise and our FlexCore appliance, we empower organizations to maintain total data sovereignty on their own hardware.
Our mission is to make the cloud faster, simpler, and fairer. By providing enterprise-grade NVIDIA GPUs and streamlined model management, we ensure that high-performance AI and machine learning are accessible to everyone. Built for transparency and performance, the Civo Team is here to give you total control over your infrastructure, your data, and your spend.
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