High-level question: Cross-environment portability

Hello. I’m very new to Kubernetes so I have to beg for patience in advance. I’m struggling to understand some basic concepts and I’m hoping someone here can give me some insight.

My question is around cross-environment portability. I understand that, unlike a VM setup, each kubernetes container does not have its own operating system but instead runs on a shared OS. First, is that shared OS whatever OS happens to be running on the host machine and, if so, how can kubernetes be portable across environments? How can my app work the same on two different operating systems? Is bringing along its own set of Bins/Lib enough?

It can’t transparently work across Linux, Windows, Mac (for example) - you have to build for that. But a Linux binary can work across Red Hat, Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS, etc.

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