Kubernetes is a portable, extensible, open source platform for managing containerized workloads and services, that facilitates both declarative configuration and automation. It has a large, rapidly growing ecosystem. Kubernetes services, support, and tools are widely available.

This page provides an overview of best practices when it comes to enforcing Pod Security Standards. Using the built-in Pod Security Admission Controller FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.25 [stable] The Pod Security Admission Controller intends to replace the deprecated PodSecurityPolicies. Configure all cluster namespaces Namespaces that lack any configuration at all should be considered significant gaps in your cluster security model. We recommend taking the time to analyze the types of workloads occurring in each namespace, and by referencing the Pod Security Standards, decide on an appropriate level for each of them.

Kubernetes requires PKI certificates for authentication over TLS. If you install Kubernetes with kubeadm, the certificates that your cluster requires are automatically generated. You can also generate your own certificates -- for example, to keep your private keys more secure by not storing them on the API server. This page explains the certificates that your cluster requires. How certificates are used by your cluster Kubernetes requires PKI for the following operations:

Kubernetes objects are persistent entities in the Kubernetes system. Kubernetes uses these entities to represent the state of your cluster. Learn about the Kubernetes object model and how to work with these objects.

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.27 [beta] System component traces record the latency of and relationships between operations in the cluster. Kubernetes components emit traces using the OpenTelemetry Protocol with the gRPC exporter and can be collected and routed to tracing backends using an OpenTelemetry Collector. Trace Collection Kubernetes components have built-in gRPC exporters for OTLP to export traces, either with an OpenTelemetry Collector, or without an OpenTelemetry Collector. For a complete guide to collecting traces and using the collector, see Getting Started with the OpenTelemetry Collector.

Kubernetes supports nodes that run Microsoft Windows.

This page explains how to enable a package repository for the desired Kubernetes minor release upon upgrading a cluster. This is only needed for users of the community-owned package repositories hosted at pkgs.k8s.io. Unlike the legacy package repositories, the community-owned package repositories are structured in a way that there's a dedicated package repository for each Kubernetes minor version. Note:This guide only covers a part of the Kubernetes upgrade process. Please see the upgrade guide for more information about upgrading Kubernetes clusters.

kube-state-metrics, an add-on agent to generate and expose cluster-level metrics.

Production-Grade Container Orchestration

Kubernetes objects can be created, updated, and deleted by using the kubectl command-line tool along with an object configuration file written in YAML or JSON. This document explains how to define and manage objects using configuration files. Before you begin Install kubectl. You need to have a Kubernetes cluster, and the kubectl command-line tool must be configured to communicate with your cluster. It is recommended to run this tutorial on a cluster with at least two nodes that are not acting as control plane hosts.