What is Kubernetes primarily used for?

Kubernetes is primarily used for orchestrating and automating containers, which is reflected in the correct answer. It serves as a powerful platform for managing containerized applications across a cluster of machines, allowing developers to deploy, scale, and manage applications efficiently. Kubernetes provides features such as load balancing, service discovery, scaling, and automated rollouts and rollbacks, making it an essential tool for organizations adopting containerization.

The core of Kubernetes is its ability to manage lifecycle operations for containers, ensuring that the desired state of applications is maintained even in the face of failures or changes in workload. This orchestration capability allows for smoother releases and operational processes, promoting a DevOps culture by enabling continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) practices.

The other choices refer to processes that are either unrelated or ancillary to container management. For instance, managing virtual machines pertains to hypervisor technology rather than container orchestration. Creating serverless applications falls within a different paradigm of computing where the underlying infrastructure is abstracted away from users. Monitoring application performance is an important operational task but does not define the primary use case of Kubernetes itself.