(1) Kubernetes pods share the same ip address. This one is huge, in that it means I am not address containers by port, but by ip address. A single pod is a coll

(1) Kubernetes pods share the same ip address. This one is huge, in that it means I am not address containers by port, but by ip address. A single pod is a collection of containers, much like a single unit of compose.yml where things can be linked together. (2) Building on (1), SkyDNS allows pods to be named. (3) Building on (2), we can define Services that are dynamically selected from pods. That means if I have a pod that depends on another pod, I can instead have it depend upon a Service. The individual pods that make up the Service can come up or go down, allowing updates and maintenance to be decoupled. Those are the basics. Note that, I remember seeing a presentation from the Docker folks debating whether they should implement something like this. The idea is too useful not to use. This is sufficiently useful to run a single-node kubelet on your dev machine instead of using Docker Compose on your dev machine. Compose will still be OK if you are only working with a single microservice/app. When that n > 1, that's when the pods and services of K8S start making a lot more sense.