{"head":{"title":"What Is Kubernetes? Plain-English Definition | OceanLab","description":"Kubernetes is an open source platform for running and managing containers across many machines. What it does, when it is worth it, an example and mistakes.","canonical":"https://oceanlab.in/glossary/kubernetes"},"crumbs":[{"name":"Home","path":"/"},{"name":"Glossary","path":"/glossary"},{"name":"Kubernetes","path":"/glossary/kubernetes"}],"slug":"kubernetes","term":"Kubernetes (K8s)","aka":["K8s"],"category":"Hosting and delivery","short":"An open source platform that runs and manages containers across a group of machines: starting them, restarting them, scaling them and routing traffic to them.","body":[["You tell Kubernetes what you want, such as five copies of this ",{"href":"/glossary/container","text":"container"}," with this much memory, reachable at this address. It works out where to run them, restarts any that crash, replaces machines that fail and rolls out new versions. Google open sourced the project in 2014."],["Every major cloud offers managed Kubernetes, where the provider runs the control layer and you manage the workloads. Simpler managed container services and ",{"href":"/glossary/serverless","text":"serverless"}," platforms cover many apps without it."]],"why":["Kubernetes gives a standard way to run many services reliably and portably across clouds. It is also complex: networking, security, upgrades and cost control all need skilled people. For a small product it can be more platform than the app needs."],"example":["A data platform runs dozens of services and batch jobs with different resource needs, for clients that require it in their own cloud accounts. Kubernetes gives one way to deploy all of it to each client's cloud with the same configs."],"inBuild":["We use Kubernetes when there are many services, portability needs or special workloads, and prefer managed container services for simpler apps. When we use it, the cluster and its workloads are defined with ",{"href":"/glossary/infrastructure-as-code","text":"infrastructure as code"},", with resource limits and ",{"href":"/glossary/autoscaling","text":"autoscaling"}," set per service."],"mistakes":[["Adopting it for a single app because it is popular."],["No resource limits, so one service can starve the others."],["Falling behind on version upgrades until the managed service forces them."]],"related":[{"href":"/glossary/container","label":"Container (software)","detail":"A package that holds an application and everything it needs to run, isolated from other software on the same machine."},{"href":"/glossary/autoscaling","label":"Autoscaling","detail":"Automatically adding or removing computing capacity, such as servers or containers, as the load on a system goes up or down."},{"href":"/glossary/microservices","label":"Microservices","detail":"A way of building an application as many small services, each owning one job and its own data, deployed independently."},{"href":"/glossary/infrastructure-as-code","label":"Infrastructure as code (IaC)","detail":"Defining servers, networks, databases and other cloud resources in code files that are versioned and applied automatically, instead of setting them up by hand."},{"href":"/glossary/load-balancer","label":"Load balancer","detail":"A service that spreads incoming traffic across several servers, and stops sending traffic to any that fail their health checks."}],"tools":[],"links":[{"href":"/pricing/categories/cloud-hosting","label":"Cloud hosting pricing","detail":"Hosting prices side by side, with sources."}],"sources":[{"title":"Kubernetes documentation, Overview","url":"https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/overview/","checkedAt":"2026-10-25"}],"legal":false,"updatedAt":"2026-10-25"}