Kubernetes nodes – data plane

In the Kubernetes cluster, the data plane consists of nodes (formerly known as minions) that are responsible for running container workloads scheduled by the master. Nodes can be physical bare-metal machines or virtual machines, which gives flexibility when designing a cluster.

The following diagram summarizes the architecture and components that compose Kubernetes nodes:

In terms of Windows support, all node components can run both on Windows and Linux machines. This means that Windows Kubernetes nodes are visible to the master in the same way as Linux nodes and from this perspective, they only differ by the type of containers that they can support.

The main components of Kubernetes nodes are as follows:

• kubelet: The main Kubernetes agent, which ensures that container workloads (Pods) are executed on the node.
• Container runtime: The software that's responsible for managing containers. It's abstracted by the Container Runtime Interface (CRI).
• kube-proxy: The network proxy that's responsible for managing the local node network.

Let's take a look at kubelet first.