Why Kubernetes?

What is a Container?

A container at its core is an allocation, portioning, and assignment of host resources such as CPU Shares, Network I/O, Bandwidth, Block I/O, and Memory, so that kernel level constructs may jail-off, isolate or “contain” these protected resources so that specific running services and namespaces may solely utilize them without interfering with the rest of the system.

Commonly known as “operating system-level virtualization containers differ from hypervisor level virtualization. The main difference is that the container model eliminates the hypervisor layer, redundant OS kernels, binaries, and libraries needed to typically run workloads in a VM.
The New Way is to deploy containers based on operating-system-level virtualization rather than hardware virtualization. These containers are isolated from each other and from the host: they have their own filesystems, they can’t see each others’ processes, and their computational resource usage can be bounded. They are easier to build than VMs, and because they are decoupled from the underlying infrastructure and from the host filesystem, they are portable across clouds and OS distributions.

Kubernetes can schedule and run application containers on clusters of physical or virtual machines. However, Kubernetes also allows developers to ‘cut the cord’ to physical and virtual machines, moving from a host-centric infrastructure to a container-centric infrastructure, which provides the full advantages and benefits inherent to containers.


If an application can run in a container, it should run great on Kubernetes. Additionally, Kubernetes is not a mere “orchestration system”; it eliminates the need for orchestration.