Kubernetes
also: K8s
The standard orchestrator that schedules, scales, heals, and networks containers across a cluster of machines.
Kubernetes (K8s) is a container orchestrator: you declare the desired state (run 5 replicas of this container, expose it here) and it continuously works to make reality match — scheduling containers onto nodes, restarting failed ones, scaling, and routing traffic. It turns a fleet of machines into one platform.
Worked example: you apply a Deployment asking for 5 replicas; if a node dies, Kubernetes notices the shortfall and reschedules the lost pods elsewhere, and a Service load-balances across whatever replicas are healthy. Gotcha: Kubernetes is powerful but complex — its declarative, eventually-consistent control loops, networking, and YAML have a steep learning curve, and it is often overkill for a small app; reach for it when you genuinely have many services and scale, not by default.