The operating system for the cloud. Kubernetes is an Orchestrator that manages thousands of containers automatically, ensuring they are running, healthy, and scaled correctly.
The smallest unit. Think of it as a Wrapper around your container. K8s doesn't run containers directly; it runs Pods.
The Blueprint. You tell it: "I want 3 replicas of App V1". The Deployment ensures that exactly 3 Pods are always running.
The Hardware (Server). Can be a physical machine or a VM. Pods run on Nodes. A cluster is made of many Nodes.
The Front Desk. Pods die and change IPs constantly. The Service gives you a stable IP to reach the fleet.
Your Role: You are the Control Plane. Define your "Desired State" and watch K8s make it happen.
Try clicking on a Pod to kill it and see Self-Healing in action.
If a server crashes at 3 AM, you don't wake up. K8s detects the dead node and moves the Pods to a healthy node automatically.
Update your app from v1 to v2 with Zero Downtime. K8s replaces Pods one by one, ensuring traffic is only sent to healthy instances.
K8s is like Tetris. It fits as many containers as possible onto your servers to save money on cloud bills.