What does a Deployment provide that directly running Pods does not?

A Deployment manages a ReplicaSet, which maintains a desired number of identical Pod replicas, automatically recreating any that fail or are deleted. It also manages rolling updates: when you change the Pod template (e.g., a new image tag), the Deployment controller incrementally replaces old Pods with new ones based on configurable maxSurge/maxUnavailable limits and readiness probe results, with built-in rollback support if the rollout fails.