The adoption of Kubernetes has seen tremendous growth since 2014, thanks to its ease in deploying and managing applications. As container orchestration software, Kubernetes is becoming popular among IT professionals due to its security and simplicity. Understanding the architecture of Kubernetes is essential to using it effectively. Kubernetes is an open-source platform for managing and deploying containers, providing service discovery, load balancing, container orchestration, container runtime, and infrastructure orchestration focused on containers. It helps automate containerized application deployment, make changes, and scale up and down these applications. It is the operating system for cloud-native applications, making it a sought-after tool for developers.
Containers are a standard approach for packaging applications and their dependencies so that they can be executed across runtime environments easily. Kubernetes helps orchestrate containers to manage them efficiently. Kubernetes is an adaptable and expandable platform for running container workloads, providing an environment to create cloud-native applications and manage their deployments. It aims to relieve application operators and developers of the effort of coordinating underlying compute, network, and storage infrastructure.
The basic Kubernetes architecture comprises many components, also known as K8s components. The control plane manages nodes, and worker nodes execute containerized apps. Kubernetes cluster is a group of nodes, and each cluster has at least one worker node. The control plane is the central nervous system center of the Kubernetes cluster design, housing the cluster’s control components and maintaining regular communication with the compute units to ensure the cluster operates as expected. Components of the control plane include the API server, the scheduler, the controller manager, and etcd. Worker nodes run containers, and each node runs a container runtime engine, such as Docker or rkt, and components for monitoring, logging, service discovery, and optional extras. Key Kubernetes cluster architecture components are nodes, container runtime engine, kubelet service, kube-proxy service, and pods.
