There are two key components to the federation capability within Kubernetes. These components make up the federation control plane.

The first is federation-controller-manager, which embeds the core control loops required to operate federation. federation-controller-manager watches the state of your clusters via apiserver and makes changes in order to reach a desired state.

The second is federation-apiserver, which validates and configures Kubernetes objects such as pods, services, and controllers. federation-apiserver is the frontend for the cluster through which all other components interact.