Exploring the control plane

The control plane, as its name suggests, has authority over every aspect of a cluster. In the absence of a functioning control plane, the cluster loses its ability to schedule workloads, create new deployments, and manage Kubernetes objects. Recognizing the criticality of the control plane, it is highly advisable to deploy with high availability (HA) support, deploying a minimum of three control plane nodes. Many production environments even utilize more than three control plane nodes, but the key principle is to have an odd number of nodes, which is required so we can maintain a highly available control plane if we lose a single etcd node.

Now, let’s delve into the importance of the control plane and its components, providing a comprehensive understanding of their pivotal role in a functioning cluster.

The Kubernetes API server

The first component to understand in a cluster is the kube-apiserver component. Since Kubernetes is application...