1. Tool for container orchestration – can manage multiple containers running on different nodes; it was created by Google and later made open source. It has a master which “manages” the several worker nodes which contain pods where the application is run.
   

2. Improves productivity through container orchestration and easy installation. hence makes it easy for managing deployment.

3. Faster and Simpler deployment of containerized applications. Hence provides consistency for different environments – QA, Dev, Staging etc – hence a better reliability.

4. Uses lesser system resources compared to VM and other infra envts

5. Application isolation separates the processes of each application into different containers

6. Portability – move the workload to different places

7. Immutability – encourages the development of distributed systems which follows immutable infra that is not affected by user modifications

8. Self monitoring – checks the health of nodes and containers constantly. Also, self-healing – able to restart containers when they are dead

9. Scalability – scale resources and applications realtime