Pods allow you to keep related containers close in terms of the network and hardware infrastructure. Data can live near the application, so processing can be done without incurring a high latency from network traversal. Similarly, common data can be stored on volumes that are shared between a number of containers. Pods essentially allow you to logically group containers and pieces of our application stacks together.

While pods may run one or more containers inside, the pod itself may be one of many that is running on a Kubernetes node (minion). As we'll see, pods give us a logical group of containers across which we can then replicate, schedule, and balance service endpoints.