DevOps Dictionary

Kubernetes is an open-source system for orchestrating containers, coordinating how containerised applications are deployed, updated, scaled, and kept running across a cluster (a group of machines). It solves the operational challenge of running many services reliably by scheduling containers onto available nodes, health-checking them, restarting failed instances, rolling out changes gradually, and providing stable networking so services can find each other even as individual containers come and go.

With Kubernetes, teams declare the desired state, such as run three copies of an API, and the platform continually works to maintain it; without it, engineers often manage placement, recovery, and releases with scripts and manual steps, which increases drift between environments, slows delivery, and raises outage risk. This gap exists because Kubernetes continuously reconciles what is actually running with what you specified should be running.