Kubernetes is one of the most widely adopted container orchestration platforms in the world, known for transforming how organizations deploy, scale, and manage containerized applications. It brings automation, reliability, and portability to distributed systems, helping DevOps teams, IT operations, and engineering organizations handle complex workloads across any infrastructure environment.
What Is Kubernetes?
Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration platform designed to automate the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications across clusters of hosts. Originally developed by Google and now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), it addresses the challenges of managing microservices-based applications composed of multiple interdependent containers.
Its user base spans from fast-growing startups to global enterprises, with particularly strong adoption among IT operations, DevOps teams, and engineering organizations that need to scale applications reliably and efficiently.
What is Kubernetes used for?
Kubernetes serves as the foundational platform for modern cloud-native applications and infrastructure automation:
- Microservices Management: Orchestrates complex microservices architectures by automating service discovery, load balancing, and inter-service communication at scale.
- Automated Scaling: Dynamically adjusts application capacity based on demand through Horizontal Pod Autoscaling, preventing performance issues during traffic spikes.
- Multi-Cloud Deployments: Provides consistent application deployment across on-premises, AWS, Azure, GCP, and hybrid environments without vendor lock-in.
- CI/CD Pipeline Integration: Serves as the deployment target for continuous delivery workflows, allowing rapid, reliable application updates.
- Self-Healing Operations: Automatically restarts failed containers, reschedules workloads from unhealthy nodes, and maintains desired application state without manual intervention.
- Resource Optimization: Improves infrastructure utilization through intelligent bin-packing and resource allocation, helping reduce cloud costs, with reported savings varying by workload and optimization strategy.
- Stateful Application Support: Manages databases and persistent workloads through StatefulSets and persistent volume orchestration.
- Edge Computing: Extends application management to edge locations for low-latency, distributed computing scenarios.
Key Features of Kubernetes
The platform's feature set covers enterprise-grade container orchestration across networking, storage, scaling, and configuration.
Container Orchestration and Pods provide the foundational abstraction for running applications, where pods encapsulate one or more containers sharing storage and network resources, scheduled intelligently across cluster nodes.
Automatic Scaling includes Horizontal Pod Autoscaling that adjusts replica counts based on CPU usage and custom metrics, plus Cluster Autoscaling that adds or removes nodes dynamically for optimal resource utilization.
Self-Healing and High Availability continuously monitor application health, automatically restarting failed containers, rescheduling pods from unhealthy nodes, and performing rolling updates with minimal downtime.
Service Discovery and Load Balancing automatically exposes applications as network services, assigns stable IP addresses, and distributes traffic across healthy instances without manual configuration.
Declarative Configuration Management uses infrastructure-as-code through YAML manifests that define desired application state, with Kubernetes controllers ensuring reality matches the declared configuration.
Persistent Storage Orchestration manages data persistence through Persistent Volumes and Claims, supporting both cloud storage and on-premises systems with automatic provisioning and lifecycle management.
Multi-Cloud Networking provides consistent networking abstractions across different infrastructure providers, including Ingress controllers for external traffic management and network policies for security.
Kubernetes Pros & Cons
Understanding Kubernetes' strengths and limitations helps organizations make informed adoption decisions.
Kubernetes Pros
- Unmatched Scalability: Supports clusters up to 10,000+ nodes, handling massive workloads that competitors cannot match at enterprise scale.
- Vendor-Neutral Portability: Runs across diverse infrastructures to reduce lock-in, supporting multi-cloud and hybrid deployment strategies, although configuration and operations can still differ between environments.
- Robust Ecosystem: Over 1,000 complementary tools and extensions through the CNCF landscape, providing solutions for every operational need.
- Production-Proven Reliability: Battle-tested at Google scale, powering billions of containers weekly with proven fault tolerance and resilience.
- Cost Optimization: Intelligent resource allocation and auto-scaling reduce infrastructure spend by eliminating overprovisioning and manual capacity planning.
- Developer Productivity: GitOps workflows and declarative configuration speed up deployments while reducing operational overhead for development teams.
Kubernetes Cons
- Steep Learning Curve: Complex concepts like pods, services, deployments, and YAML configurations overwhelm newcomers, requiring significant training investment.
- Operational Complexity: Managing production clusters demands expertise in networking, storage, security, and troubleshooting distributed systems.
- Resource Overhead: Control plane and node-level components consume CPU and memory, making it inefficient for small workloads or single-node deployments.
- Limited Native Observability: Lacks built-in monitoring and logging, requiring additional tools like Prometheus and Grafana for production visibility.
- Stateful Application Challenges: Primarily designed for stateless workloads, requiring StatefulSets and operators for complex database deployments.
- Multi-Cloud Networking Complexity: While portable, unified control planes across clouds require sophisticated networking and specialized expertise.
Kubernetes Pricing
Kubernetes itself is completely free as an open-source project maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
Costs arise from the underlying infrastructure and managed services that run Kubernetes clusters. Major cloud providers offer managed Kubernetes services with different pricing models:
Cost optimization strategies include using spot instances (up to 90% savings), reserved capacity commitments (30-57% discounts), and right-sizing workloads through Vertical Pod Autoscaling. Third-party tools like Kubecost provide cost visibility and optimization recommendations.
Automate the Operational Workflows Around Your Container Infrastructure
Kubernetes excels at container orchestration. But the operational requests that surround container deployments (cluster access, environment provisioning, cross-team incident coordination) still rely on manual handoffs between IT, DevOps, and management.
Here's what Siit adds to organizations running Kubernetes:
- Automated Request Intake — Developers request cluster access, environment provisioning, or tool licenses through Slack or Teams. Siit handles triage, routing, and resolution automatically.
- Cross-Departmental Coordination — When a pod failure triggers an alert that requires coordination across IT, DevOps, and management, Siit routes the incident to the right on-call engineer and keeps teams aligned without Slack thread chaos.
- Native Integration Depth — 50+ pre-built integrations with Okta, Jamf, BambooHR, and Google Workspace. Siit connects your operational systems without middleware or custom development.
- Access Provisioning — When a developer needs access to a new namespace or tool, Siit picks up the request, routes approval to the right manager, and provisions access through your identity provider once approved.
Try It With Siit
Kubernetes handles the technical orchestration of your containerized applications. Siit handles the human workflows that keep those applications running: access requests, approvals, onboarding, and cross-team coordination.
Book a demo to see how Siit automates DevOps workflows alongside your container infrastructure.
Kubernetes Alternatives
Several alternatives address specific use cases where Kubernetes may be overkill or too complex:
- Docker Swarm: Simpler container orchestration with minimal setup, ideal for small teams familiar with Docker but lacking Kubernetes' advanced networking and scaling features.
- HashiCorp Nomad: Multi-workload orchestrator supporting containers, VMs, and applications with lower complexity but a less mature ecosystem than Kubernetes.
- Amazon ECS: AWS-native container service with simpler management but vendor lock-in and limited multi-cloud portability compared to Kubernetes.
- Azure Container Instances (ACI): Serverless container deployment for simple workloads without the operational overhead of cluster management.
- Google Cloud Run: Fully managed serverless platform for containerized applications with automatic scaling, but less control than Kubernetes.
All cloud providers offer managed Kubernetes services (EKS, AKS, GKE) that reduce operational complexity while maintaining Kubernetes compatibility.
