What Is Kubernetes Architecture? – Components Overview

Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestrator that automates deployment, scaling, and administration tasks. It provides abstraction layers for running containerized workloads in production and supports auto-scaling functionality. The system's architecture includes several components such as Workloads (Pods, Deployments, Services, Jobs), Control Plane (API Server, Controller Manager, Scheduler, Etcd, Cloud Controller Manager), Nodes (Kubelet, kube-proxy, Container Runtime), and extensibility features. Kubernetes is highly customizable and can be extended with CRDs, networking plugins, storage classes, and custom functionality. However, its complexity also presents potential security risks that need to be addressed for production use.