Kubernetes: Robust Management of Multi-container Applications

The Kubernetes project—sometimes abbreviated as k8s—was born out of an internal container management project at Google known as Borg. Kubernetes comes from the Greek word for navigator, as denoted by the seven-spoke wheel of the project’s logo. Kubernetes is written in the Go programming language and provides a robust framework to deploy and manage Docker container applications on the underlying resources managed by cloud providers (such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP)).

Kubernetes is fundamentally a tool to control applications composed of one or more Docker containers deployed in the cloud; this collection of containers is known as a pod. Each pod can have one or more copies (to allow redundancy), which is known as a replicaset. The two main components of a Kubernetes deployment are a control plane and nodes. The control plane hosts the centralized logic for deploying and managing pods and consists of the following:

• Kube-api-server: This is the main application that listens to commands from the user to deploy or update a pod or manages external access to pods via ingress.

• Kube-controller-manager: This is an application that manages functions such as controlling the number of replicas per pod. ...