Kubernetes – a quick introduction

A container is a unit of software that packages code and its dependencies, such as libraries and configuration files. When compared to running applications on physical or virtual machines, a container enables applications to run faster and reliably across computing environments. Containers make it easier to build applications that use microservice design patterns. They are critical to the concept of continuous development, integration, and deployment as incremental changes can be made against a container image and can be quickly deployed to a compute environment of choice (that supports process isolation).

Given that containers are lean and easy to deploy, an organization might end up deploying its applications as several containers. This poses challenges as some of the applications might need to interact with one another. Additionally, the life cycle of the application should also be monitored and managed. For example, if an application...