Control Plane Components
kube-apiserver
The API server is the front end for the Kubernetes control plane.
etcd
Consistent and highly-available key value store used as Kubernetes’ backing store for all cluster data.
kube-scheduler
Control plane component that watches for newly created Pods with no assigned node, and selects a node for them to run on.
kube-controller-manage
cloud-controller-manager
Node Components
Node components run on every node, maintaining running pods and providing the Kubernetes runtime environment.
kubelet
An agent that runs on each node in the cluster. It makes sure that containers are running in a Pod. The kubelet doesn’t manage containers which were not created by Kubernetes.
kube-proxy
kube-proxy maintains network rules on nodes.
Container runtime
A fundamental component that empowers Kubernetes to run containers effectively. It is responsible for managing the execution and lifecycle of containers within the Kubernetes environment.