Updated: 24 February 2025
Kubernetes is the most popular way to deploy, run and manage containers in production.
- Hosting microservices in their own containers is a common pattern for microservice-based development. It’s not uncommon to have many different microservices composing a single application.
- A container orchestrator is a system that automatically deploys and manages containerized apps. For example, the orchestrator can dynamically respond to changes in the environment to increase or decrease the deployed instances of the managed app. It can also ensure all deployed container instances get updated if a new version of a service is released.
- Kubernetes abstracts away complex container management tasks, and provides you with declarative configuration to orchestrate containers in different computing environments.
See Deploy a .NET microservice to Kubernetes
- k8s
- An abbreviation for Kubernetes
- Helm
- The k8s package manager
- minikube
- Local Kubernetes, focusing on making it easy to learn and develop for Kubernetes.
- Pod
- One or more Containers, tied together for the purposes of administration and networking. By default a Pod is only accessible by its internal IP address within the Kubernetes cluster. To make a Container accessible from outside the Kubernetes virtual network, expose the Pod as a Kubernetes Service.
- Deployment
- A Kubernetes Deployment checks on the health of a Pod and restarts the Pod’s Container if it terminates. Deployments are the recommended way to manage the creation and scaling of Pods.
- StatefulSets
- StatefulSets maintain the state of applications beyond an individual pod lifecycle.