Kubernetes

Architecture & Control Plane

Understand the components that make a cluster work.

40 min read intermediate 3 objectives

Status

Not started

What you will learn

  • Name control plane components
  • Explain the node components
  • Trace a pod creation

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The basics, in plain English

Once you have many containers across many machines, running them by hand is impossible. Kubernetes is an autopilot that runs containers for you across a group of machines, restarts crashed ones, and scales them up or down. The group of machines is called a cluster.

Kubernetes (k8s)
A system that automatically runs and manages containers across many machines.
Cluster
The group of machines Kubernetes manages as one big pool.
Node
A single machine (the worker) in the cluster that actually runs containers.
Control plane
The brain of the cluster that decides what runs where and keeps things healthy.
Orchestration
Automatically scheduling, healing, and scaling containers without a human babysitting.
Desired state
You declare what you want (e.g. 3 copies running) and Kubernetes makes it true.
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The pieces

API server, etcd, scheduler, and controller-manager form the control plane. kubelet and kube-proxy run on every node. Everything flows through the API server.

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