The worker nodes that do this task in Kubernetes are simply called nodes. Previously, around 2014, they were called minions, but this term was later replaced with just nodes, as the name was confusing with Salt's terminologies and made people think that Salt was playing a major role in Kubernetes.
These nodes are the only place that you will be running workloads, as it is not recommended to have containers or loads on the master nodes, as they need to be available to manage the entire cluster.
The nodes are very simple in terms of components; they only require three services to fulfill their task:
- Kubelet
- Kube-proxy
- Container runtime
Let's explore these three components in a little bit more depth.
