Pods

Pod is the smallest or fundamental component of a Kubernetes architecture. One very important feature of Pod is that it is ephemeral. This means that if a Pod fails, then Kubernetes can automatically create its new replica.

Role of a Pod

The pod is an abstraction over a container. Pod creates a running environment or a layer on top of the Container. The reason is that Kubernetes wants to abstract away the container runtime or container technologies so that we can replace them if we want to. This is also so that we don’t have to directly work with Docker or whatever container technology we use in Kubernetes. so we only interact with the Kubernetes layer.

The pod is usually meant to run one application container inside of it. You can run multiple containers inside one Pod but usually, it’s only the case if you have one main application container and a helper container or some side service that has to run inside of that pod.

In the diagram above we have an application Pod which is our own application and that also uses a database Pod with its own container. We have one server and two containers running on it with a abstraction layer on top of it.

Fundamental Kubernetes Components and their role in Container Orchestration

Kubernetes or K8s is an open-sourced container orchestration technology that is used for automating the manual processes of deploying, managing and scaling applications by the help of containers. Kubernetes was originally developed by engineers at Google and In 2015, it was donated to CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation)

To understand Kubernetes, one must understand its basic components and its building blocks. In this article, we will be discussing the most fundamental components of Kubernetes as well as what are they used for.

Kubernetes has tons of components but most of the time we are going to be working with just a handful of them. Following is the list of all the important components of Kubernetes along with their roles in Kubernetes.

Similar Reads

1. Pods

Pod is the smallest or fundamental component of a Kubernetes architecture. One very important feature of Pod is that it is ephemeral. This means that if a Pod fails, then Kubernetes can automatically create its new replica....

2. Virtual Network

Virtual Network is the component of Kubernetes which enables the worker nodes and the master nodes to talk to each other. Virtual Network actually turns all the nodes inside of the cluster into one powerful machine that has the sum of all the resources of individual nodes....

3. IP addresses

In Kubernetes, inside the virtual network, each Pod gets its own IP address (note that Pod gets the IP address not the container) and each Pod can communicate with each other using that IP address....

4. Service

The official definition on services says that “a Service is a method for exposing a network application that is running as one or more Pods in your cluster.” Service is basically a static IP address or permanent IP address that can be attached to the Pod. That means that “my app” will have its own Service and database Pod will have its own Service....

5. Ingress

The official definition of Ingress says “Ingress is an API object that manages external access to the services in a cluster”....

6. Config Map

Config Map is the external configuration to your application. Config Map usually contains configuration data like URLs of database or URLs of some other services that we are using....

6. Secret

Secret is just like config map but the difference is that it’s used to store secret data credentials and it stores this data not a plain text format but in base64 encoded format....

7. Volumes

A Volume in Kubernetes is a data storing feature with the help of which we can store data that is persistent and can be accessed by containers in a Kubernetes pod....

8. Deployment

Deployment are the Kubernetes component that manages the replication and lifecycle of the Pods in the Kubernetes Cluster....

9. StatefulSet

StatefulSets are the Kubernetes component that manages the replication and lifecycle of the Pods in the Kubernetes Cluster but specifically for Stateful applications....

Conclusion

The best way to understand the Kubernetes architecture is to first start with all the components of Kubernetes and how they work. Make sure to go through all the Kubernetes Components we discussed in this article before you learn about the Kubernetes architecture in order to understand it in a more comprehensive way....

FAQs on Fundamental Kubernetes Components and their role in Container Orchestration:

1. What is the use of Virtual Network?...

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