Kubernetes (k8s) is an open-source system for automatically deploying, scaling, and managing containers. Core concepts: Pod (smallest unit — one or more containers), Node (physical or virtual server), Cluster (set of Nodes), Namespace (logical separation).
Workload resources: Deployment (for stateless apps, rolling update), StatefulSet (for stateful apps like databases), DaemonSet (one per Node). Service types: ClusterIP (internal), NodePort (external port), LoadBalancer (cloud load balancer). Ingress routes HTTP/HTTPS traffic. Helm is Kubernetes's package manager. K8s is complex — for small projects, Docker Compose or a PaaS is often the better choice.
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