What is Kubernetes? - Kubernetes Tutorial

- Since it was launched as an open source project in 2015, Kubernetes has proven to be one of the most exciting and dynamic software projects of all time. Kubernetes is eating the world and surveys of software engineers, DevOps professionals, and chief technology officers show us this is true. According to the official 2021 Cloud Native Computing Foundation survey, 96% of organizations are either using or evaluating Kubernetes and more than 5.6 million developers are using it today. Kubernetes' release was announced by Google in 2014 and the system's design was influenced by Google's internal cluster management system called Borg. Instead of keeping the idea to themselves, Google worked with the Linux Foundation to form a new organization called the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and donated Kubernetes as the first open source project under the purview of the CNCF. Kubernetes, also known as "Kates" or K8s, is Greek for the word pilot or helmsman of a ship. Kubernetes has this name because it's a container orchestrator. Like the captain of a ship leading their crew, Kubernetes makes decisions about where and how containerized applications are launched on a server, when to scale up and down the number of application replicas, and what to do when an application or server stops working. Kubernetes is an open source project written in the programming language Go and it's designed to provide planet-scale deployment, meaning that the biggest companies in the world can run and grow their applications using the platform and rapidly-growing companies can start small and grow to a near-infinite scale. Spotify is one example of a company that uses Kubernetes. The music and podcast streaming platform has over 200 million monthly users. And before using Kubernetes, the company used its own container orchestration platform called Helios. Since its debut, Spotify has experienced explosive growth. And in 2018, the engineering team realized they couldn't keep up with maintaining Helios so they decided to migrate their workloads to Kubernetes. Migrating to Kubernetes provided the company with many benefits. In an interview about the migration, site reliability engineer James Wen said, "The biggest service currently running on Kubernetes "takes about 10 million requests per second as an aggregate service and benefits greatly from autoscaling. "Before, teams would have to wait for an hour "to create a new service and get an operational host "to run it in production. "But with Kubernetes, they can do that on the order "of seconds and minutes." 10 million requests per second is a lot. But Kubernetes can handle it by scaling up the number of pods and nodes when needed and it will also scale those things down when there are fewer requests, providing automatic elasticity that saves you and your company money on compute resources. Kubernetes can run on any kind of server, in an on-prem data center, a public cloud, or a hybrid of both. You can install Kubernetes on your own or you can use a managed Kubernetes service. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Red Hat, DigitalOcean, and other cloud providers offer Kubernetes as a service products that let you install Kubernetes with the click of a button and start deploying containerized applications fast. There's a lot of buzz around Kubernetes and for good reason. It's one of the biggest open source software projects in history, second only to the Linux kernel. And it has an enormous community of code contributors, technical educators, and advocates dedicated to the project, and all supported by the CNCF. In this video, you've heard a bit about the history of Kubernetes and why it's so popular. In our next video, we'll review the basics of container technology, which was the precursor to the development of Kubernetes.