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Knowledge Base
Core Components of a Kubernetes Cluster
TOPICS
The Nexqloud Advantage: Managed Kubernetes (NKE)
Core Components of a Kubernetes Cluster
Why Use a Kubernetes Cluster? Key Benefits
Your Foundation for Cloud-Native Success
Common Use Cases
Key Kubernetes Concepts: Pods, Deployments, and Services
Knowledge Base
Core Components of a Kubernetes Cluster

Core Components of a Kubernetes Cluster

A K8s cluster is composed of two main logical groupings of machines:

  1. The Control Plane (The Brain)
    ‍    The control plane is the administrative heart of the cluster. It is responsible for maintaining the desired state of your applications—such as which images to run, how many replicas to maintain, and how to update them. Its key components include:
    • API Server: The front door to the cluster. All interactions go through the API server.
    • Scheduler: Watches for newly created containers and assigns them to healthy worker nodes based on resource needs and policies.
    • Controller Manager: Ensures the cluster's actual state matches the desired state (e.g., if a container fails, it orders a replacement).
    • etcd: A highly available key-value store that acts as the cluster's "single source of truth," storing all configuration data.
  2. The Worker Nodes (The Brawn)
    ‍    Worker nodes are the machines where your application workloads actually run. Each node must run three critical components:
    • Kubelet: An agent that communicates with the control plane and ensures containers are running in a Pod.
    • Container Runtime: The software, like containerd, that pulls the container image from a registry and runs the container.
    • Kube-proxy: Manages network rules to allow communication to and from your containers.