Dear friend, welcome to this comprehensive 4500+ word guide aimed at demystifying Kubernetes architecture!
I assume you have basic awareness of Kubernetes as a leading container orchestration platform. No worries if not, I‘ll provide sufficient background before deep diving into the architectural components.
My goal is to help you truly appreciate the elegant abstractions and inner workings that enable Kubernetes to seamlessly deploy and manage containerized workloads across clusters.
This guide is structured in a modular way for easy understanding:
- Kubernetes Background
- Master Node Components
- Worker Node Components
- Networking
- Storage
- Conclusion
So let‘s get started!
Kubernetes Background
As adoption of microservices and cloud-native architectures exploded, containerization became the de facto way to reliably package and deploy applications. But running containers at scale across clusters required a sophisticated orchestration platform.
Kubernetes originated as an open-source project out of Google based on their internal container management systems and Borg cluster manager. Today Kubernetes has become the industry standard for container orchestration, supported by all major cloud providers including AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.
At its core, Kubernetes (aka K8s) simplifies deployment, scaling and operations of containerized applications using the following key abstractions:
Pods
Pods represent a group of tightly coupled containers that share networking and storage. They form the basic building blocks and unit of deployment in Kubernetes.
Services
Services enable exposing a set of pods as a network service to facilitate communication between various components.
Ingresses
Ingress expose HTTP/HTTPS routes from outside the cluster to access services running within the cluster.
Volumes
Volumes provide data persistence across container restarts and cluster the pod belongs to.
These resources are deployed and managed by the various components that make up the Kubernetes architecture. Let‘s start exploring those components!
Kubernetes Master Node Components
The Kubernetes master is responsible for maintaining the desired cluster state. It provides a unified view of the cluster and drives orchestration decisions across distributed nodes.
Kube API Server
As the front-end of the Kubernetes control plane, the API server handles REST operations…
