Kubernetes is a portable and open source platform used for the management of containerized applications and services. It is used to facilitate the configuration and automation of applications. Kubernetes is growing fast, and its support, services, and tools are available to the masses.

Kubernetes is a Google project that was made open source in 2014, and hence it is developed with the decades of Google's experience of handling large-scale workloads, integrated with the best ideas and practices contributed by the community.

Kubernetes works with a lot of different tools, including Docker, to provide the containerized applications a platform for the purposes of scaling, operations, and automation of deployment.

Joe Beda, Brendan Burns, and Craig McLuckie first developed Kubernetes. Different engineers at Google, such as Brian Grant and Tim Hockin, soon joined them. The Borg system of Google has been a heavy influence on the design and development of Kubernetes, as many of the top contributors first worked on the Borg project.

In 2015, Google released Kubernetes v1.0, partnered with Linux Foundation, and went on to form Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

Some of the features of Kubernetes are as follows:

• A container platform
• A microservice platform
• A portable cloud platform

The theme of the Kubernetes platform is to support container-related management environments. Kubernetes provides portability, simplicity, and flexibility over different infrastructures, mimicking Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) on some levels. Kubernetes offers a lot of functionalities, however, the open source nature of this platform enables constant improvement and added features to the system. This regular update system is exactly why Kubernetes was envisioned as a platform so that it builds an ecosystem of components and tools that would assist in the deployment, scaling, and management of the application, making it all easier to handle.

The design of Kubernetes has allowed a number of different systems to be built upon it. Labels allow the users to organize the resources per their desire, and annotations offer them a chance to customize the resources and information to suit their workflow and manage their tools.

The APIs on which the Kubernetes control plane is built are also available to developers and users, and hence, users can build their own customized controls and APIs. They can also be easily targeted by any general CLI tool and manipulated as per the requirements of the developer.

Despite its many awesome functionalities, Kubernetes is still not an alternative to a PaaS system. It can be perceived as such because of its many similarities, such as providing a platform for applications to be deployed, scaled, logged, and monitored. Kubernetes is aimed to support a variety of diverse applications with their workloads and data processing. However, only containerized applications will perform well on the Kubernetes platform.