Cluster Components

A list of terms used in the context of a K8s cluster.

You don’t have to implement these, but these come up when you are reading docs so it can be useful to have some background:

1. control plane: The thing that receives your kubectl requests and then takes action.
2. API server: A REST API on HTTPS which kubectl connects to, and also what Pods can use internally (with service accounts).
   
3. scheduler: Watches for new pod requests and selects a node to run it on.
4. controller manager: runs internal components, for example the kube-controller-manager observes node availablity.
5. etcd is the Kubernetes data store. It is a distributed key-value database, which is replicated across many instances.
6. kubelet: background agent that runs on the server (not in a pod/container), receives requests to create Pods and sends heartbeats to the API server.
7. kube-proxy: routes traffic b/w pods or Pods to the outside world. This runs as a DaemonSet on every node.
8. container runtime: This is typically Docker, but it can be other things like CRI-O or containerd. It is the thing that runs the containers.