What Is Kubernetes

Kubernetes (often written K8s) runs containers for you at scale. Docker builds and runs a container on one machine; Kubernetes takes many containers and spreads them across a cluster of machines, restarts them when they crash, scales them up and down, and connects them to each other.

You describe what you want (three copies of my web server, reachable on port 80) and Kubernetes keeps the cluster in that state.

You control a cluster from the terminal with the kubectl command. Every command follows the same pattern: a verb and a resource, such as kubectl get pods or kubectl delete pod web.

To check that the tool is installed and see its version, run:

kubectl version --client

The --client flag prints only the version of kubectl itself, without contacting a cluster.