In this section, you'll get a sense of what Kubernetes is all about, its history, and how it became so popular.

The primary function of Kubernetes is deploying and managing a large number of container-based workloads on a fleet of machines (physical or virtual). This means that Kubernetes provides the means to deploy containers to the cluster. It makes sure to comply with various scheduling constraints and pack the containers efficiently into the cluster nodes. In addition, Kubernetes automatically watches your containers and restarts them if they fail. Kubernetes will also relocate workloads off problematic nodes to other nodes. Kubernetes is an extremely flexible platform. It relies on a provisioned infrastructure layer of compute, memory, storage, and networking, and, with these resources, it works its magic.

Kubernetes and the entire cloud-native scene is moving at breakneck speed, but let's take a moment to reflect on how we got here. It will be a very short journey because Kubernetes came out of Google in June 2014, just a few years ago. When Docker became popular, it changed how people package, distribute, and deploy software. But, it soon became apparent that Docker doesn't scale on its own for large distributed systems. A few orchestration solutions became available, such as Apache Mesos, and later, Docker's own swarm. But, they never measured up to Kubernetes. Kubernetes was conceptually based on Google's Borg system. It brought together the design and technical excellence of a decade of Google engineering, but it was a new open source project. At OSCON 2015, Kubernetes 1.0 was released and the floodgates opened. The growth of Kubernetes, its ecosystem, and the community behind it, was as impressive as its technical excellence.

Kubernetes means helmsman in Greek. You'll notice many nautical terms in the names of Kubernetes-related projects.

Kubernetes is now a household name. The DevOps world pretty much equates container orchestration with Kubernetes. All major cloud providers offer managed Kubernetes solutions. It is ubiquitous in enterprise and in startup companies. While Kubernetes is still young and innovation keeps happening, it is all happening in a very healthy way. The core is rock solid, battle tested, and used in production across lots and lots of companies. There are very big players collaborating and pushing Kubernetes forward, such as Google (obviously), Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, and VMware.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) open source organization offers certification. Every 3 months, a new Kubernetes release comes out, which is the result of a collaboration between hundreds of volunteers and paid engineers. There is a large ecosystem surrounding the main project of both commercial and open source projects. You will see later how Kubernetes' flexible and extensible design encourages this ecosystem and helps in integrating Kubernetes into any cloud platform.