Kubernetes

Definition

Kubernetes (K8s) is an open-source container orchestration system originally developed by Google and donated to the CNCF. It automates the deployment, scaling, and management of containerised applications across clusters of nodes.

In depth

Kubernetes introduces a rich set of abstractions — Pods, Deployments, Services, Namespaces, DaemonSets — each generating its own stream of events, metrics, and logs. Monitoring a Kubernetes cluster requires visibility at multiple layers: infrastructure (node CPU/memory), cluster (pod scheduling, resource quotas), workload (Deployment replica counts, HPA scaling events), and application (request rates, error rates, latency within Pods). The OpenTelemetry Operator for Kubernetes simplifies instrumentation by automatically injecting the OTel Collector as a sidecar or DaemonSet. obseria.io ships a certified Kubernetes integration that collects all cluster layers out of the box and displays them in a unified Kubernetes explorer.

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