The third and final major Kubernetes component are the cluster nodes. While the master node components only run on a subset of the Kubernetes cluster, the node components run everywhere; they manage the maintenance of running pods, containers, and other primitives and provide the runtime environment. There are three node components:

• Kubelet
• Kube-proxy
• Container runtime

We'll dig into the specifics of these components later, but it's important to note several things about node componentry first. The kubelet can be considered the primary controller within Kubernetes, and providers the pod/node APIs that are used by the container runtime to execute container functionality. This functionality is grouped by container and their corresponding storage volumes into the concept of pods. The concept of a pod gives application developers a straightforward packaging paradigm from which to design their application, and allows us to take maximum advantage of the portability of containers, while realizing the power of orchestration and scheduling across many instances of a cluster.

It's interesting to note that a number of Kubernetes components run on Kubernetes itself (in other words, powered by the kubelets), including DNS, ingress, the Dashboard, and the resource monitoring of Heapster:

In the preceding diagram, we see the core architecture of Kubernetes. Most administrative interactions are done via the kubectl script and/or RESTful service calls to the API.

As mentioned, note the ideas of the desired state and actual state carefully. This is the key to how Kubernetes manages the cluster and its workloads. All the pieces of K8s are constantly working to monitor the current actual state and synchronize it with the desired state defined by the administrators via the API server or kubectl script. There will be times when these states do not match up, but the system is always working to reconcile the two.

Let's dig into more detail on the Master and node instances.