What is Node?
A physical or virtual machine in a Kubernetes cluster that runs pods.
A Node is a worker machine in a Kubernetes cluster — a physical server or virtual machine. Each node runs the kubelet (pod management agent), kube-proxy (networking), and a container runtime (containerd). The control plane assigns pods to nodes based on resource availability and scheduling constraints. Nodes can be cordoned (stop scheduling new pods) and drained (migrate pods away) for maintenance. Node capacity is defined by CPU, memory, and extended resources (GPUs).
More Kubernetes Terms
Admission Controller
A Kubernetes plugin that intercepts API requests before objects are persisted.
Auto Scaling
Automatically adjusting the number of compute resources based on demand.
ClusterIP
The default Kubernetes Service type that exposes a service on an internal cluster IP.
ConfigMap
A Kubernetes object for storing non-sensitive configuration data as key-value pairs.
Controller Manager
Kubernetes control plane component running control loops to maintain desired state.
CoreDNS
The default DNS server in Kubernetes clusters for service discovery.
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