Kubernetes
Also known as: K8s
Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration platform that schedules, scales, and self-heals workloads across a fleet of nodes. TantraDev runs Kubernetes (EKS, AKS, GKE) where workload heterogeneity or multi-tenancy justifies the operational tax — and explicitly recommends managed alternatives (ECS Fargate, Cloud Run) where they don't. Picking K8s for a five-service app is usually the wrong call.
Concepts that travel with this one.
Architecture rarely lives in isolation — these are the terms that come up in the same conversation.
Docker
Docker packages an application and its userspace dependencies into a portable image that runs identically across developer laptops, CI runners, and production hosts. The value is reproducibility — `docker build` produces the same artefact every time, so the bug a developer sees locally is the bug an engineer can attach a debugger to in staging.
Terraform
Terraform is HashiCorp's declarative infrastructure-as-code tool. You write the desired state (a VPC, an RDS cluster, an IAM role) in HCL and Terraform reconciles cloud reality to match. TantraDev writes Terraform for everything — networks, databases, secrets, monitoring — and hands the state and modules back at the end of every engagement so the runbook works without us.
GitOps
GitOps is operational discipline that treats a Git repository as the single source of truth for system state — application config, infrastructure, deployment manifests. A reconciliation agent (ArgoCD, Flux) continuously drives the cluster toward whatever Git says it should be. The benefit is auditable change history and a one-revert rollback; the cost is the operational maturity to keep Git authoritative.
Building a system where Kubernetes is the load-bearing decision?
30 minutes on the phone, one page in your inbox — what to build, what to skip, what it will cost. You keep the audit even if we are not the right fit.