Diving into Kubernetes architecture in depth

Kubernetes has very ambitious goals. It aims to manage and simplify the orchestration, deployment, and management of distributed systems across a wide range of environments and cloud providers. It provides many capabilities and services that should work across all these diverse environments and use cases, while evolving and remaining simple enough for mere mortals to use. This is a tall order. Kubernetes achieves this by following a crystal-clear, high-level design and well-thought-out architecture that promotes extensibility and pluggability.

Kubernetes originally had many hard-coded or environment-aware components, but the trend is to refactor them into plugins and keep the core small, generic, and abstract.

In this section, we will peel Kubernetes like an onion, starting with various distributed systems design patterns and how Kubernetes supports them, then go over the surface of Kubernetes, which is its set of APIs, and then...