Exploring the control plane

As its name suggests, the control plane controls every aspect of a cluster. If your control plane goes down, you can probably imagine that your cluster will encounter issues. Without a control plane, a cluster will not have any scheduling abilities, which means that workloads that are running will remain running unless they are stopped and restarted. Since the control plane is extremely important, it is always suggested that you have at least three master nodes. Many production installations run more than three master nodes, but the number of installed nodes should always be an odd number. Let's look at why the control plane and its components are so vital to a running cluster by examining each one.

The Kubernetes API server

The first component to understand in a cluster is the kube-apiserver component. Since Kubernetes is application programming interface (API)-driven, every request that comes into a cluster goes through the API server. Let...