Kubernetes is a container orchestration system. Core concepts include a cluster (control plane + worker nodes), pods as the smallest deployable unit running containers, deployments/statefulsets for desired replica state, services/ingress for networking, and ConfigMaps/Secrets and Namespaces for configuration and isolation.
Expanding on the short answer — what usually matters in practice:
A tiny example (an explanation template):
// Example: discuss trade-offs for "kubernetes-basic-concepts?"
function explain() {
// Start from the core idea:
// Pod (smallest unit), Deployment (manages replicas/updates), Service (networking), ConfigMa
}