What is Kubernetes?
Kubernetes is an open source orchestrator for deploying containerized applications. Kubernetes also known as K8s, is an open-source Container Management tool. It provides container runtime, container orchestration, container centric infrastructure orchestration, self healing mechanisms, service discovery, load balancing and container (de)scaling. Initially It was developed by Google for managing containerized applications in clustered environments but later donated to CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation, a child entity of Linux Foundation).
Kubernetes is Written in Go programming language. It is a platform designed to completely manage the life cycle of containerized applications and services using methods that provide predictability, scalability, and high availability.
What is Container orchestration?
Container orchestration automates the deployment, management, scaling, and networking of containers across the cluster. It is focused on managing the life cycle of containers. Enterprises that usually deploy and manage hundreds or thousands of Linux containers and hosts can take benefits from container orchestration.
Container orchestration is used to automate the following tasks at scale:
- Configuring and Scheduling of containers
- Provisioning and Deployment of containers
- Redundancy and Availability of containers
- Health monitoring of containers and hosts
- Scaling up or removing containers to spread application load evenly across host infrastructure
- Movement of containers from one host to another if there is a shortage of resources in a host, or if a host dies
- Allocation of resources between containers
- External exposure of services running in a container with the outside world
- Load balancing of service discovery between containers
Docker Swarm vs Kubernetes
Kubernetes and Docker Swarm are Container Orchestration tools. Both are used to deploy containers inside a cluster but there are few differences between them.
Features | Docker Swarm | Kubernetes |
Installation & Cluster Configuration | It’s installation is very simple; but cluster is not very strong | It’s installation is complicated but once setup done, the cluster is very strong |
Scalability | It is highly scalable & scales 5x faster than Kubernetes | Highly scalable & scales fast |
Auto Scaling | Docker Swarm cannot do auto scaling |
Kubernetes can do auto scaling |
Rolling Updates & Rollbacks | It can deploy Rolling updates, but not automatic Rollbacks | It can deploy Rolling updates & does automatic Rollbacks |
GUI | There is no GUI in Docker swarm | GUI is the Kubernetes Dashboard |
Data Volumes | It can share storage volumes with any other container | Can share storage volumes only with other containers in same Pod |
Logging & Monitoring | 3rd party tools like ELK can be used for logging & monitoring |
In built tools for logging & monitoring |
Certified Kubernetes Distributions
- Cloud Managed : EKS by AWS, AKS by Azure and GKE by GCP
- Self Managed : OpenShift by Redhat and Docker Enterprise
- Local dev/test : Micro K8s by Canonical, Minikube
- Vanilla Kubernetes : The core Kubernetes project( baremetal ), Kubeadm
- Special builds : K3s by Rancher, a light weight K8s distribution for Edge devices
Online Emulator: https://labs.play-with-k8s.com/
Kubernetes Cluster
A Kubernetes cluster is a collection of physical or virtual machines and other infrastructure resources that are required to run your containerized applications. Each machine in a Kubernetes cluster is called a Node.
There are two types of Nodes in each Kubernetes cluster.
- Master Node : Hosts the Kubernetes control plane components and manages the Kubernetes Cluster
- Worker Node : Runs your containerized applications
Control Plane or Master Node Components
Kubernetes Master is responsible for managing the complete cluster. You can access master node via the CLI, GUI, or API. The master watches over the nodes in the cluster and is responsible for the actual orchestration of containers on the worker nodes For achieving fault tolerance. There can be more than one master node in a cluster. It is the access point from which administrators and other users interact with a cluster to manage the scheduling and deployment of containers.
There are four main components of Master Node or Control Plane in Kubernetes.
- kube-apiserver
- etcd
- kube-controller-manager
- kube-scheduler
Kube-API Server Manager
Masters communicate with the rest of the cluster through the kube apiserver , the main access point to the control plane. It validates and executes user’s REST commands. Kube apiserver also makes sure that configurations in etcd match with configurations of containers deployed in the cluster.


ETCD
ETCD is a distributed reliable key value store used by Kubernetes to store all data used to manage the cluster. When you have multiple nodes and multiple masters in your cluster, etcd stores all that information on all the nodes in the cluster in a distributed manner. ETCD is responsible for implementing locks within the cluster to ensure there are no conflicts between the Masters.
Kube-Controller-Manager
The controllers are the brain behind orchestration. They are responsible for noticing and responding when nodes, containers or endpoints goes down. The controllers makes decisions to bring up new containers in such cases. The kube controller manager runs control loops that manage the state of the cluster by checking if the required deployments, replicas, and nodes are running in the cluster.
Kube-Schedular
The scheduler is responsible for distributing work or containers across multiple nodes. It looks for newly created containers and assigns them to Nodes.
Kubernetes Worker
Kubernetes worker node contains below services.
- Kubelet
- Kube-Proxy
- Container Runtime Engine
Kubelet


Worker nodes have the kubelet agent which interacts with master to provide health information of the worker node. To carry out actions requested by the master on the worker nodes. Kubelet acts as the node agent responsible for managing the lifecycle of every worker node.
Kube-Proxy
Kube Proxy is responsible for ensuring network traffic is routed properly to internal and external services as required and is based on the rules defined by network policies in kube controller manager and other custom controllers. It manages the network rules on each node. It also performs connection forwarding or load balancing for Kubernetes cluster services.
Container Runtime Engine
A container runtime is a CRI (Container Runtime Interface) compatible application that executes and manages containers.
Conclusion
Hence you got better understanding of Kubernetes. In our upcoming tutorials, we will install and setup kubernetes clusters on different platforms. Stay tuned for other DevOps tutorials.
Read Also : An Advanced Overview of Docker
1 thought on “Kubernetes Tutorial – Advanced Overview of K8s”