Manages containerised workloads and services. Orchestrates Containers across a cluster.

See also: Containers, Service Mesh, Agones, AWS (EKS), Container Networking

kubectl cheatsheet

Components

Overview

  • Control plane — API server, etcd, scheduler, controller manager
  • Nodes — kubelet, kube-proxy, container runtime

Workload Concepts

  • Pod — smallest deployable unit, contains one or more containers sharing network and storage
  • Deployment — manages stateless Pods, supports rolling updates
  • StatefulSet — like Deployment, with guarantees about ordering and stable identity
  • DaemonSet — ensures all (or some) Nodes run a copy of a Pod
  • Job / CronJob — run-to-completion and scheduled workloads
  • Service — stable network endpoint for a set of Pods
  • Ingress — HTTP/HTTPS routing to Services from outside the cluster
  • ConfigMap / Secret — externalised configuration; Secrets are base64-encoded, not encrypted by default

Isolation

  • Namespaces — logical separation within a cluster
  • NetworkPolicy — restrict pod-to-pod traffic
  • RBAC — role-based access control for API access

Operators

Extend Kubernetes with custom controllers managing CRDs.