Kubernetes, also known as K8s, is an open-source container-orchestration system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.
It groups containers that make up an application into logical units for easy management and discovery.
It was originally designed by Google and is now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
Kubernetes works with a variety of container runtimes such as Docker, Containerd, and CRI-O. Container runtimes must be compliant with the Container Runtime Interface (CRI) introduced by Kubernetes in 2016.
Many cloud services offer a Kubernetes-based platform or infrastructure as a service (PaaS or IaaS) on which Kubernetes can be deployed as a platform-providing service. Many vendors also provide their own branded Kubernetes distributions.