Introduction to Kubernetes for Developers

Kubernetes has become the de facto standard for container orchestration. If you’re building modern applications, understanding Kubernetes is no longer optional—it’s essential.

Core Concepts

Pods

A pod is the smallest deployable unit in Kubernetes. It contains one or more containers that share network and storage resources.

Deployments

Deployments manage the desired state of your pods. They handle rolling updates, rollbacks, and scaling.

Services

Services provide stable network endpoints for pods. Since pods can come and go, services give you a consistent way to communicate with them.

Getting Started

The quickest way to learn Kubernetes locally is with tools like:

• minikube: Single-node cluster for development
• kind: Kubernetes in Docker
• k3s: Lightweight Kubernetes for resource-constrained environments

Deployment Example

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: my-app
spec:
  replicas: 3
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: my-app
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: my-app
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: my-app
        image: my-app:latest
        ports:
        - containerPort: 8080

Conclusion

Kubernetes has a steep learning curve, but the investment pays off when you need to run reliable, scalable applications in production.