Kubernetes concepts

Deploy applications on multiple machines (using containers deployed in Pods)

Monitor container health and restart failed containers

Scale containers up and down based on load

Update containers with new versions

Allocate resources between containers

Balance traffic across machines

Containerized — Kubernetes is a container orchestration tool. To use Kubernetes, you must first have your applications containerized. Depending on the type of application, this could be as a set of microservices, as batch jobs or in other forms. Then, your applications can take advantage of a Kubernetes workflow that encompasses a huge ecosystem of tools, where containers can be stored as images in a container registry, deployed to a Kubernetes cluster, and run on an available node. You can build and test individual containers on your local computer with Docker or another container runtime, before deploying them to your Kubernetes cluster.

Scalable — If the demand for your applications exceeds the capacity of the running instances of those applications, Kubernetes is able to scale up. As needed, Kubernetes can tell if applications require more CPU or memory and respond by either automatically expanding available capacity or using more of existing capacity. Scaling can be done at the Pod level, if there is enough compute available to just run more instances of the application (horizontal Pod autoscaling), or at the node level, if more nodes need to be brought up to handle the increased capacity (Cluster Autoscaler or Karpenter). As capacity is no longer needed, these services can delete unnecessary Pods and shut down unneeded nodes.

Available — If an application or node becomes unhealthy or unavailable, Kubernetes can move running workloads to another available node. You can force the issue by simply deleting a running instance of a workload or node that’s running your workloads. The bottom line here is that workloads can be brought up in other locations if they can no longer run where they are.

Declarative — Kubernetes uses active reconciliation to constantly check that the state that you declare for your cluster matches the actual state. By applying Kubernetes objects to a cluster, typically through YAML-formatted configuration files, you can, for example, ask to start up the workloads you want to run on your cluster. You can later change the configurations to do something like use a later version of a container or allocate more memory. Kubernetes will do what it needs to do to establish the desired state. This can include bringing nodes up or down, stopping and restarting workloads, or pulling updated containers.

Composable — Because an application typically consists of multiple components, you want to be able to manage a set of these components (often represented by multiple containers) together. While Docker Compose offers a way to do this directly with Docker, the Kubernetes Kompose command can help you do that with Kubernetes. See Translate a Docker Compose File to Kubernetes Resources for an example of how to do this.

Extensible — Unlike proprietary software, the open source Kubernetes project is designed to be open to you extending Kubernetes any way that you like to meet your needs. APIs and configuration files are open to direct modifications. Third-parties are encouraged to write their own Controllers, to extend both infrastructure and end-user Kubernetes featues. Webhooks let you set up cluster rules to enforce policies and adapt to changing conditions. For more ideas on how to extend Kubernetes clusters, see Extending Kubernetes.

Portable — Many organizations have standardized their operations on Kubernetes because it allows them to manage all of their application needs in the same way. Developers can use the same pipelines to build and store containerized applications. Those applications can then be deployed to Kubernetes clusters running on-premises, in clouds, on point-of-sales terminals in restaurants, or on IOT devices dispersed across company’s remote sites. Its open source nature makes it possible for people to develop these special Kubernetes distributions, along will tools needed to manage them.

Hardware — If you don’t have hardware available to run Kubernetes per your requirements, a cloud provider such as Amazon Amazon EKS can save you on upfront costs. With Amazon EKS, this means that you can consume the best cloud resources offered by Amazon, including computer instances (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud), your own private environment (Amazon VPC), central identity and permissions management (IAM), and storage (Amazon EBS). Amazon manages the computers, networks, data centers, and all the other physical components needed to run Kubernetes. Likewise, you don’t have to plan your datacenter to handle the maximum capacity on your highest-demand days. For Amazon EKS Anywhere, or other on premises Kubernetes clusters, you are responsible for managing the infrastructure used in your Kubernetes deployments, but you can still rely on Amazon to help you keep Kubernetes up to date.

Control plane management — Amazon EKS manages the security and availability of the Amazon-hosted Kubernetes control plane, which is responsible for scheduling containers, managing the availability of applications, and other key tasks, so you can focus on your application workloads. If your cluster breaks, Amazon should have the means to restore your cluster to a running state. For Amazon EKS Anywhere, you would manage the control plane yourself.

Tested upgrades — When you upgrade your clusters, you can rely on Amazon EKS or Amazon EKS Anywhere to provide tested versions of their Kubernetes distributions.

Add-ons — There are hundreds of projects built to extend and work with Kubernetes that you can add to your cluster’s infrastructure or use to aid the running of your workloads. Instead of building and managing those add-ons yourself, Amazon provides Amazon EKS add-ons that you can use with your clusters. Amazon EKS Anywhere provides Curated Packages that include builds of many popular open source projects. So you don’t have to build the software yourself or manage critical security patches, bug fixes, or upgrades. Likewise, if the defaults meet your needs, it’s typical for very little configuration of those add-ons to be needed. See Extend Clusters for details on extending your cluster with add-ons.

Managed control plane — Amazon makes sure that the Amazon EKS cluster is available and scalable because it manages the control plane for you and makes it available across Amazon Availability Zones.

Node management — Instead of manually adding nodes, you can have Amazon EKS create nodes automatically as needed, using Managed Node Groups (see Simplify node lifecycle with managed node groups) or Karpenter. Managed Node Groups have integrations with Kubernetes Cluster Autoscaling. Using node management tools, you can take advantage of cost savings, with things like Spot Instances and node consolidation, and availability, using Schedulingfeatures to set how workloads are deployed and nodes are selected.

Cluster networking — Using CloudFormation templates, eksctl sets up networking between control plane and data plane (node) components in the Kubernetes cluster. It also sets up endpoints through which internal and external communications can take place. See De-mystifying cluster networking for Amazon EKS worker nodes for details. Communications between Pods in Amazon EKS is done using Amazon EKS Pod Identities (see Learn how EKS Pod Identity grants pods access to Amazon services), which provides a means of letting Pods tap into Amazon cloud methods of managing credentials and permissions.

Add-Ons — Amazon EKS saves you from having to build and add software components that are commonly used to support Kubernetes clusters. For example, when you create an Amazon EKS cluster from the Amazon Management console, it automatically adds the Amazon EKS kube-proxy (Manage kube-proxy in Amazon EKS clusters), Amazon VPC CNI plugin for Kubernetes (Assign IPs to Pods with the Amazon VPC CNI), and CoreDNS (Manage CoreDNS for DNS in Amazon EKS clusters) add-ons. See Amazon EKS add-ons for more on these add-ons, including a list of which are available.

Communicating with cluster components (API server) — The API server (kube-apiserver) exposes the Kubernetes API so requests to the cluster can be made from both inside and outside of the cluster. In other words, requests to add or change a cluster’s objects (Pods, Services, Nodes, and so on) can come from outside commands, such as requests from kubectl to run a Pod. Likewise, requests can be made from the API server to components within the cluster, such as a query to the kubelet service for the status of a Pod.

Store data about the cluster (etcd key value store) — The etcd service provides the critical role of keeping track of the current state of the cluster. If the etcd service became inaccessible, you would be unable to update or query the status of the cluster, though workloads would continue to run for a while. For that reason, critical clusters typically have multiple, load-balanced instances of the etcd service running at a time and do periodic backups of the etcd key value store in case of data loss or corruption. Keep in mind that, in Amazon EKS, this is all handled for you automatically by default. Amazon EKS Anywhere provides instruction for etcd backup and restore. See the etcd Data Model to learn how etcd manages data.

Schedule Pods to nodes (Scheduler) — Requests to start or stop a Pod in Kubernetes are directed to the Kubernetes Scheduler (kube-scheduler). Because a cluster could have multiple nodes that are capable of running the Pod, it is up to the Scheduler to choose which node (or nodes, in the case of replicas) the Pod should run on. If there is not enough available capacity to run the requested Pod on an existing node, the request will fail, unless you have made other provisions. Those provisions could include enabling services such as Managed Node Groups (Simplify node lifecycle with managed node groups) or Karpenter that can automatically start up new nodes to handle the workloads.

Keep components in desired state (Controller Manager) — The Kubernetes Controller Manager runs as a daemon process (kube-controller-manager) to watch the state of the cluster and make changes to the cluster to reestablish the expected states. In particular, there are several controllers that watch over different Kubernetes objects, which includes a statefulset-controller, endpoint-controller, cronjob-controller, node-controller, and others.

Manage cloud resources (Cloud Controller Manager) — Interactions between Kubernetes and the cloud provider that carries out requests for the underlying data center resources are handled by the Cloud Controller Manager (cloud-controller-manager). Controllers managed by the Cloud Controller Manager can include a route controller (for setting up cloud network routes), service controller (for using cloud load balancing services), and node lifecycle controller (to keep nodes in sync with Kubernetes throughout their lifecycles).

Manage each node (kubelet) — The API server communicates with the kubelet service running on each node to make sure that the node is properly registered and Pods requested by the Scheduler are running. The kubelet can read the Pod manifests and set up storage volumes or other features needed by the Pods on the local system. It can also check on the health of the locally running containers.

Run containers on a node (container runtime) — The Container Runtime on each node manages the containers requested for each Pod assigned to the node. That means that it can pull container images from the appropriate registry, run the container, stop it, and responds to queries about the container. The default container runtime is containerd. As of Kubernetes 1.24, the special integration of Docker (dockershim) that could be used as the container runtime was dropped from Kubernetes. While you can still use Docker to test and run containers on your local system, to use Docker with Kubernetes you would now have to Install Docker Engine on each node to use it with Kubernetes.

Manage networking between containers (kube-proxy) — To be able to support communication between Pods, Kubernetes uses a feature referred to as a Service to set up Pod networks that track IP addresses and ports associated with those Pods. The kube-proxy service runs on every node to allow that communication between Pods to take place.

A base image — A base container image is a container that is typically built from either a minimal version of an operating system’s file system (such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Ubuntu) or a minimal system that is enhanced to provide software to run specific types of applications (such as a nodejs or python apps).

Application software — You can add your application software to your container in much the same way you would add it to a Linux system. For example, in your Dockerfile you can run npm and yarn to install a Java application or yum and dnf to install RPM packages. In other words, using a RUN command in a Dockerfile, you can run any command that is available in the file system of your base image to install software or configure software inside of the resulting container image.

Instructions — The Dockerfile reference describes the instructions you can add to a Dockerfile when you configure it. These include instructions used to build what is in the container itself (ADD or COPY files from the local system), identify commands to execute when the container is run (CMD or ENTRYPOINT), and connect the container to the system it runs on (by identifying the USER to run as, a local VOLUME to mount, or the ports to EXPOSE).

Storage — When a running container is stopped and deleted, data storage in that container will disappear, unless you set up more permanent storage. Kubernetes supports many different storage types and abstracts them under the umbrella of Volumes. Storage types include CephFS, NFS, iSCSI, and others. You can even use a local block device from the local computer. With one of those storage types available from your cluster, you can mount the storage volume to a selected mount point in your container’s file system. A Persistent Volume is one that continues to exist after the Pod is deleted, while an Ephemeral Volume is deleted when the Pod is deleted. If your cluster administrator created different StorageClasses for your cluster, you might have the option for choosing the attributes of the storage you use, such as whether the volume is deleted or reclaimed after use, whether it will expand if more space is needed, and even whether it meets certain performance requirements.

Secrets — By making Secrets available to containers in Pod specs, you can provide the permissions those containers need to access file systems, data bases, or other protected assets. Keys, passwords, and tokens are among the items that can be stored as secrets. Using secrets makes it so you don’t have to store this information in container images, but need only make the secrets available to running containers. Similar to Secrets are ConfigMaps. A ConfigMap tends to hold less critical information, such as key-value pairs for configuring a service.

Container resources — Objects for further configuring containers can take the form of resource configuration. For each container, you can request the amount of memory and CPU that it can use, as well as place limits of the total amount of those resources that the container can use. See Resource Management for Pods and Containers for examples.

Disruptions — Pods can be disrupted involuntarily (a node goes down) or voluntarily (an upgrade is desired). By configuring a Pod disruption budget, you can exert some control over how available your application remains when disruptions occur. See Specifying a Disruption Budget for your application for examples.

Namespaces — Kubernetes provides different ways to isolate Kubernetes components and workloads from each other. Running all the Pods for a particular application in the same Namespace is a common way to secure and manage those Pods together. You can create your own namespaces to use or choose to not indicate a namespace (which causes Kubernetes to use the default namespace). Kubernetes control plane components typically run in the kube-system namespace.

Stateless applications — A stateless application doesn’t save a client’s session data, so another session doesn’t need to refer back to what happened to a previous session. This makes is easier to just replace Pods with new ones if they become unhealthy or move them around without saving state. If you are running a stateless application (such as a web server), you can use a Deployment to deploy Podsand ReplicaSets. A ReplicaSet defines how many instances of a Pod that you want running concurrently. Although you can run a ReplicaSet directly, it is common to run replicas directly within a Deployment, to define how many replicas of a Pod should be running at a time.

Stateful applications — A stateful application is one where the identity of the Pod and the order in which Pods are launched are important. These applications need persistent storage that is stable and need to be deployed and scaled in a consistent manner. To deploy a stateful application in Kubernetes, you can use StatefulSets. An example of an application that is typically run as a StatefulSet is a database. Within a StatefulSet, you could define replicas, the Pod and its containers, storage volumes to mount, and locations in the container where data are stored. See Run a Replicated Stateful Application for an example of a database being deployed as a ReplicaSet.

Per-node applications — There are times when you want to run an application on every node in your Kubernetes cluster. For example, your data center might require that every computer run a monitoring application or a particular remote access service. For Kubernetes, you can use a DaemonSet to ensure that the selected application runs on every node in your cluster.

Applications run to completion — There are some applications you want to run to complete a particular task. This could include one that runs monthly status reports or cleans out old data. A Job object can be used to set up an application to start up and run, then exit when the task is done. A CronJob object lets you set up an application to run at a specific hour, minute, day of the month, month, or day of the week, using a structure defined by the Linux crontab format.

Services — Because a Pod can move around to different nodes and addresses, another Pod that needed to communicate with the first Pod could find it difficult to find where it is. To solve this problem, Kubernetes lets you represent an application as a Service. With a Service, you can identify a Pod or set of Pods with a particular name, then indicate what port exposes that application’s service from the Pod and what ports another application could use to contact that service. Another Pod within a cluster can simply request a Service by name and Kubernetes will direct that request to the proper port for an instance of the Pod running that service.

Ingress — Ingress is what can make applications represented by Kubernetes Services available to clients that are outside of the cluster. Basic features of Ingress include a load balancer (managed by Ingress), the Ingress controller, and rules for routing requests from the controller to the Service. There are several Ingress Controllers that you can choose from with Kubernetes.

Get started with Amazon EKS – eksctl

Create an Amazon EKS cluster

Deploy a sample application on Linux

Organize and monitor cluster resources