Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration platform designed to automate the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. It has become the defacto standard for container orchestration and is backed by key players like Google, AWS, Microsoft, IBM, Intel, Cisco, and Red Hat. Kubernetes helps organizations move faster, is cost-efficient, cloud-agnostic, and provides a self-service platform-as-a-service that creates a hardware abstraction layer for development teams. It also offers features such as load balancing, security, monitoring, and logging to simplify the management of containerized applications. Despite its benefits, Kubernetes adoption can be challenging due to factors like complexity, skill acquisition, and managing large-scale deployments. To overcome these challenges, it's essential to follow best practices such as resource optimization, secret management, network policies, RBAC, and backup and disaster recovery. Additionally, tools like Helm and Istio can help streamline the management of Kubernetes applications, while New Relic provides a platform for monitoring and analyzing Kubernetes clusters and workloads.