Understanding the worker node components

Worker nodes, as the name implies, are responsible for running workloads. When we discussed the kube-scheduler component of the control plane, we mentioned that when a new Pod is scheduled, the kube-scheduler component will decide which node to run the Pod on. It does this using information that has been sent to it from the worker nodes. This information is constantly updated to help spread Pods around a cluster to utilize resources efficiently.

Each worker node has two main components, kubelet and kube-proxy:

kubelet

You may hear a worker node referred to as a kubelet. The kubelet is an agent that runs on all worker nodes, and it is responsible for running the actual containers.

kube-proxy

Contrary to the name, kube-proxy is not a proxy server at all. kube-proxy is actually responsible for routing network communication between a Pod and the network.

Container runtime

Each node also needs a container runtime. A container...