Kubernetes—usually shortened to K8s—schedules containers across a fleet of machines, restarts them when they crash, balances traffic between replicas, and gives platform teams a common vocabulary for deploying software. AWS EKS, Google GKE, Azure AKS, and OpenShift dominate the managed offerings; smaller shops often run vanilla Kubernetes on bare metal or pick lighter alternatives like Nomad or ECS. The container itself is usually a Docker image, packaging an application with its dependencies into something that runs the same way on a laptop and in production.
Kubernetes solved real problems and created new ones. The learning curve is steep enough that many companies that adopted it for a single web service ended up hiring a platform team to keep it healthy. Cost surprises come from idle nodes, mis-tuned autoscaling, and chatty observability agents shipping logs to vendors that charge by the gigabyte. A common pattern in 2026 is to keep Kubernetes for stateful or compute-heavy workloads and push stateless web services to simpler platforms like Cloud Run, Fargate, or Fly.
For teams choosing whether to adopt it, the deciding question is rarely “can we run Kubernetes”—most can—but “do we need to”. A handful of containers behind a load balancer rarely justifies the operational burden. Once the count crosses a few dozen services, multiple regions, and a need for consistent CI/CD across teams, the math starts to favor a platform investment over per-team improvisation.