Squarespace abstracts away code so non-developers can make websites. To the best of my knoweledge, you can't really do anything complicated with Squarespace but it takes care of a lot of the hassles of building a website such as figuring out security, social media integrations, and design layouts.

Web applications (web apps) are essentially websites but with some additional functionality. Web apps can work the same as websites by having urls for different pages but are distinct in that they can do things that a website hosted on Squarespace can't do. This is because to build a web app requires some coding up front which is both an advantage and disadvantage of webapps in comparison to a site hosted on Squarespace.

Heroku is a platform as a service (PaaS) offering that lets developers utilize version control tools to update their webapps. This means the level of complexity for deploying a new version of webapp is incredibly simple.

Imagine that you collaborate in an office that publishes technical documentation and various technical writers can work on multiple parts of the same document. Each new version of the document gets published to a PDF that users can access.

This is essentially what Heroku provides along with abstracting away some of the difficulties of getting a web app hosted such as security, setting it up so your site uses https, and some basic monitoring and logging.

Sometimes web apps look and feel like a singular thing but are actually multiple pieces working together. In this case, you may want to isolate these different pieces.

Doing so can be really difficult, and to the best of my knowledge, Heroku isn't necessarily designed with this level of orchestration in mind. This is where Kubernetes comes in.

I've never used Kubernetes, so I might get a few things wrong here but from what I understand, Kubernetes gives developers/devops people a lot more fine grained control of how the various pieces of a webapp or webapps get deployed and managed. Kubernetes let's you take advantage of containers which are sort of like micro operating systems but only with the dependencies you need installed for a service to run. This means you can write in a file "I want x replicas of this part of my app and y replicas of this other part of my app to be ran across z number of workers".

What this abstracts is how an webapp should be ran without manually setting up each piece your self.

Here is a video with a bit more info on Kubernetes: https://youtu.be/PH-2FfFD2PU

Thank you.

Sorry to see you're getting downvoted, but it's probably because that's just too long of a story to put in a comment. The parent you're replying to was being sarcastic: he meant to say, "well if we're going to pay other people to do our job, why stop at Heroku? why not pay squarespace even more money to do more work for us?" A reductio ad absurdum.

Ironically, he's right. But, as someone pointed out: Squarespace is probably not relevant in a conversation about Kubernetes, while Heroku is.

What Kubernetes is, is a long story. Suffice to say: if you don't know what it is, count your blessings. :)

So, what I'm hearing is that my confusion is justified because Squarespace doesn't do what kubernetes and heroku do.

Is that accurate enough?

Right. Squarespace is a hosting provider and website builder that anyone should be able to use to build a website, typically a smaller scale website like a blog or a small to medium online store / e-commerce site. It's similar to Wix, Weebly, WordPress.com, and the website builders that some hosting providers offer.

Kubernetes is a tool large companies use to manage a large number of servers. Google invented it and open-sourced it so now it's free for anyone to use. It's not something people would use for a single website unless it was a huge website that required lots of servers, like FoxNews.com or something.

Kubernetes is a tool that lets Squarespace more efficiently host large numbers of websites on a smaller number of machines.

https://www.cncf.io/people/end-user-community/

Thanks. That makes me feel a lot less stupid. It's much more in line with what I thought.

yes, but that's on purpose. "This is about Kubernetes, stop changing the subject to Heroku." or something. it's hard to read sarcasm online.

Thanks.

These two online books (made to seem like Children's books) represent a true ELI5 explanation: phippy.io

Thanks. That's perfect.