Glossary
An open-source system for automating the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications, originally developed at Google and now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
Why It Matters
Running containerized applications at any real scale means constantly handling failures, traffic spikes, and rolling updates by hand — Kubernetes automates that: restarting failed containers, distributing load, and scaling capacity up or down based on demand, without a human manually intervening for every change.
This is part of our Digital Platforms capability — the architecture that lets one platform serve every user type a business has, instead of a separate codebase per department.
See the full Digital Platforms capabilityIs Kubernetes necessary for every project?
No — it adds real operational complexity that isn't justified for a small application with predictable, low traffic. It earns its complexity when a system has multiple services that need independent scaling and resilience.
What's the difference between Kubernetes and a container like Docker?
Docker packages an application into a container; Kubernetes orchestrates many containers across many machines — scheduling them, restarting them on failure, and scaling them. They're complementary, not competing, tools.