Kubernetes is an open-source platform for automating deployment, scaling, and operations of containerized applications. It provides basic mechanisms such as service discovery, load balancing, failure recovery, horizontal scaling, and self-healing. Key Kubernetes concepts include pods, labels, replication controllers, services, and namespaces. Pods are the basic building blocks that can contain one or more containers, which are scheduled together on nodes and share resources. Kubernetes handles tasks such as health checking, restarting containers, and load balancing.