# What's K8S?

In short, K8S is a system that takes care of deploying and running applications. You would generally use it to build your own infrastructure platform and, in an organisation setting, make it easier for teams to maintain their own deployments.

Before K8S hit the mainstream, this kind of work would be handled by a crack team of Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) or old-skool sysadmins, and they would provision all of your servers and set them up for you.

In that sense, K8S takes the place of automated configuration management tools like Chef, Puppet, Salt, Ansible, and plain old POSIX-compliant shell scripts.