Although containers bring a helpful layer of abstraction and tooling for application management, Kubernetes brings additional to schedule and orchestrate containers at scale, while managing the full application life cycle.

K8s moves up the stack, giving us constructs to deal with management at the application- or service- level. This gives us automation and tooling to ensure high availability, application stack, and service-wide portability. K8s also allows finer control of resource usage, such as CPU, memory, and disk space across our infrastructure.

Kubernetes architecture is comprised of three main pieces:

• The cluster control plane (the master)
• The cluster state (a distributed storage system called etcd)
• Cluster nodes (individual servers running agents called kubelets)