Kubernetes Overview
What is Kubernetes?
- Open-source container orchestration platform
- Originally developed by Google (Borg system)
- Now maintained by Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)
- Manages containerized applications across clusters
Key Features
- Automated deployment and scaling
- Self-healing capabilities
- Service discovery and load balancing
- Storage orchestration
- Secret/configuration management
- Batch execution (in addition to services)
Core Components
Control Plane
- API Server: Frontend for cluster management
- etcd: Distributed key-value store for cluster data
- Scheduler: Assigns workloads to nodes
- Controller Manager: Regulates cluster state
- Cloud Controller Manager: Cloud provider integrations
Worker Nodes
- Kubelet: Node agent
- Kube Proxy: Network traffic management
- Container Runtime: Docker/containerd/CRI-O
Key Objects
- Pods: Smallest deployable units
- Services: Network endpoints
- Deployments: Declarative updates
- ConfigMaps/Secrets: Configuration management
Architecture Overview

flowchart TD
subgraph ControlPlane
API-Server
Scheduler
ControllerManager
etcd
end
subgraph WorkerNode1
subgraph Pod1
Container1
Container2
end
subgraph Pod2
Container3
end
Kubelet
end
subgraph WorkerNode2
subgraph Pod3
Container4
end
Kubelet
end
API-Server -->|Manages| WorkerNode1
API-Server -->|Manages| WorkerNode2
Kubelet -->|Reports to| API-Server
Kubelet -->|Manages| Pod1
Kubelet -->|Manages| Pod2
Kubelet -->|Manages| Pod3
Common Use Cases
- Microservices architecture
- Hybrid/multi-cloud deployments
- Continuous Deployment pipelines
- Machine learning workflows
- Legacy application modernization
Benefits
- Horizontal scaling
- High availability
- Infrastructure abstraction
- Cloud-agnostic deployments
- Declarative configuration
Quick Start Example
# Create a deployment
kubectl create deployment nginx --image=nginx
# Expose as service
kubectl expose deployment nginx --port=80
# Scale up
kubectl scale deployment nginx --replicas=3
Learning Resources
- Official Documentation
- Kubernetes the Hard Way
- KubeAcademy
- Book: "Kubernetes in Action" by Marko Luksa