Kubernetes docs — Overview

The first-party canonical definition of Kubernetes, ingested to ground the spoke’s substrate page beyond its integration-tax framing.

Citable facts

Definition: “a portable, extensible, open source platform for managing containerized workloads and services, that facilitates both declarative configuration and automation.”
Lineage: open-sourced by Google in 2014, combining 15+ years of running production workloads at scale (the Borg predecessor). A CNCF project.
Name: Greek for helmsman/pilot; K8s = the 8 letters between K and s.
What it provides: service discovery + load balancing, storage orchestration, automated rollouts/ rollbacks (declarative desired-state), automatic bin packing, self-healing (restart/replace/ reschedule failed containers), secret + config management, horizontal scaling, batch execution, IPv4/IPv6 dual-stack, extensibility.
What it is NOT: not a traditional all-inclusive PaaS — it doesn’t build/deploy source, doesn’t ship built-in middleware/databases, doesn’t mandate logging/monitoring or a config language. It runs a continuous control loop toward desired state (more than one-shot orchestration).

T1 — first-party (kubernetes.io). Definitional/foundational.