At its core, Kubernetes is a portable, extensible, and open-source platform designed to help development teams everywhere better manage containerized workloads and services.

It's a groundbreaking solution that empowers both declarative configuration and automation in equal measure.But more than that, Kubernetes has become incredibly popular over the last few years thanks to its large, rapidly growing ecosystem.

Various Kubernetes services, support, and even optimized tools are widely available - finally unlocking a world of possibilities for development teams that previously would have been difficult (if not impossible) to replicate on their own).Google first open-sourced the Kubernetes project all the way back in 2014 and it was itself the product of more than 15 years of Google's experience in running sophisticated production workloads at scale.

The combination of best-of-breed ideas, along with the best practices honed by one of the most passionate communities on the Internet, has truly created a perfect storm in the best possible way.Kubernetes BasicsTo put it as simply as possible, Kubernetes is a container orchestration platform that was designed from the top down to automate as many of the manual processes involved with containerized applications as possible.

Because of that, the other apps would underperform at the same time.Then came the virtualized development era, which allowed developers to run many different virtual machines (also known as VMs) on a single CPU.

Each container has its own file system, memory, process space, CPU, and much, much more - and Kubernetes helps you manage every last aspect of this in the most efficient way possible.Running Your First ContainerAs previously mentioned, Kubernetes is all about helping you implement and rely on a container-based infrastructure in your production environments.