Kubernetes is a system created by Google (replacing a previous stack with system called Borg and Omega) which they made open source.
The name is Greek for helmsman or captain (the person who steers the ship). It is often shortened to k8s, the 8 replacing the eight characters between the K and the S, and some people pronounce this keights.
What it Does
There is not a lot it doesn’t do.
Contrary to Docker which only cares about starting, stopping and deleting application (low level), Kubernetes cares about high level: scheduling, scaling, healing, updating etc.
At a high level, there is a Kubernetes cluster to host applications. Each nodes in the cluster is running some Kubernetes software and a container runtime (usually Docker or Containerd). Above all of this there is the brain of Kubernetes: K8s Control Plane.