Kubernetes Basics

Kubernetes is an "open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications" on one or more machines. Kubernetes automates many of the tasks necessary to deploy, manage, and scale applications that are running as a container. This automation is vital when managing applications in data center or cloud environment where there are 100’s or 1000’s of machines and a corresponding complexity in numbers of applications.Fedora provides several technologies, in addition to Kubernetes, that run containers such as Docker or Podman.

Kubernetes had its genesis in the concepts and principles used at Google to run container-base workloads at scale and with resilience. Kubernetes is now at the center of a vast ecosystem of products and services (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) that help organizations create, install, run, manage and secure container-based applications and services at any possible scale.

There are numerous ways to install and configure Kubernetes depending on purpose and target environment. Is this for a home lab on a single machine, a small cluster for home or business automation, edge-based services and applications in remote offices or enterprise scale production workloads in the cloud?

There is an enormous amount of Kubernetes information available online and in books. A good place to start is the Kubernetes Documentation web site. Become familiar with what is available here, then use your favorite search engine to find additional material tailored to your requirements.

The Kubernetes team uses semantic versioning for Kubernetes where a given version has 3 primary components separated by periods: major.minor.patch. An example is 1.30.1 where the major version is 1, the minor version is 30, and the patch level is 1. A Kubernetes release is a new minor version such as 1.30 or 1.31. The versioned rpms in Fedora are, therefore, at the minor version level.

Using dnf update on an existing versioned kubernetes rpm will update patch releases only. See the update process recommendations for versioned rpms.

Kubernetes is complex and like many complex systems has its own terminology. The terminology used in this guide are defined here. The Kubernetes teams maintains a comprehensive glossary which is used in the subset below.

Kubernetes and the ecosystem of related components found under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation umbrella is vast as is the plethora of internet accessible information about Kubernetes. Kubernetes and this ecosystem is also evolving rapidly such that online information may be out-dated or incomplete (likely including information in this Quick Doc -ed).