The dominant open-source container orchestrator, the substrate most modern SRE work runs on.
Kubernetes (k8s) is an open-source container orchestrator originally designed at Google, now the default substrate for running containerized applications at scale. It schedules containers across a cluster of nodes, handles service discovery, autoscaling, rolling updates, secret management, persistent storage, and self-healing for failed pods. SRE teams care about Kubernetes because it both solves a category of operational pain (manual deploys, capacity, restarts) and creates a new one (the cluster itself becomes a complex distributed system to operate).
Most modern SRE jobs assume Kubernetes literacy because most modern infrastructure is on Kubernetes. A team's incident readiness is now measured in part by 'can the on-call engineer drain a node, scale a deployment, exec into a pod, and read events at 3am'. Investing in agent-driven runbooks for Kubernetes patterns is the single biggest MTTR cut available to most teams.
See the part of the platform that handles kubernetes in production.