If you’ve ever wondered why exactly Kubernetes is a thing OR wondered what the root problem is that Kubernetes solves, then this post from Jef Spaleta is for you.

For organizations that operate at a massive scale, a single Linux container instance isn’t enough to satisfy all of their applications’ needs. It’s not uncommon for sufficiently complex applications, such as ones that communicate through microservices, to require multiple Linux containers that communicate with each other. That architecture introduces a new scaling problem: how do you manage all those individual containers?

…Enter Kubernetes, a container orchestration system — a way to manage the lifecycle of containerized applications across an entire fleet.