Kubernetes is an open-source platform designed to automate the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. It follows a cluster architecture with master nodes that include components like the API server, scheduler, controller manager, and etcd, while worker nodes run the Kubelet, Kube-Proxy, and container runtime. Kubernetes manages Pods and Containers, their lifecycle, container images, deployments, rolling updates, rollbacks, scaling, probes, services and networking, storage and volumes, configuration and secrets, logging and monitoring, security and authentication, namespaces, resource quotas, labels and selectors, annotations, StatefulSets, Helm Charts, Operators, and more.