Kubernetes from 40k Feet
At the highest level, Kubernetes is two things:
- A cluster for running applications
- An orchestrator of cloud-native microservices apps.
On the cluster front, Kubernetes is like any other cluster — a bunch of nodes and a control plane. The control plane exposes an API, has a scheduler for assigning work to nodes, and state is recorded in a persistent store. Nodes are where application services run.
Kubernetes is API-driven and uses standard HTTP RESTful verbs to view and update the cluster.
On the orchestrator front, "orchestrator" is just a fancy name for an application that's made from lots of small independent services that work together to form a useful app.
Let's look at a quick analogy.
In the real world, a football (soccer) team is made of individuals. No two are the same, and each has a different role to play in the team — some defend, some attack, some are great at passing, some tackle...