- CKA
- Certified Kubernetes Administrator — a hands-on, performance-based certification from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation validating skills to install, configure, and manage production Kubernetes clusters.
- Pod
- The smallest deployable unit in Kubernetes, consisting of one or more containers that share networking and storage and are scheduled together on the same node.
- kube-apiserver
- The Kubernetes control-plane component that exposes the REST API, validates requests, and serves as the central hub through which all cluster interactions pass.
- etcd
- A distributed, consistent key-value store used as Kubernetes' backing store for all cluster state and configuration data.
- kube-scheduler
- The control-plane component that assigns newly created Pods to nodes based on resource availability, constraints, and scheduling policies.
- kube-controller-manager
- The control-plane process that runs controller loops responsible for reconciling actual cluster state with desired state (e.g., node, replication, and endpoint controllers).
- kubelet
- The node agent running on every worker node that ensures containers defined in PodSpecs are running as expected and reports status to the control plane.
- kube-proxy
- A network proxy running on each node that implements Kubernetes Service networking rules, enabling communication to and between Pods.
- Deployment
- A Kubernetes controller object that manages ReplicaSets to provide declarative updates, rolling deployments, and rollback capability for stateless applications.
- ReplicaSet
- A controller that maintains a stable set of a specified number of identical Pod replicas running at any given time.
- StatefulSet
- A controller for managing stateful applications that require stable network identities, persistent storage, and ordered deployment/scaling/termination.
- DaemonSet
- A controller that ensures a copy of a specific Pod runs on all (or a selected subset of) nodes in the cluster.
- Service
- An abstraction that defines a stable network endpoint and load-balances traffic to a dynamic set of Pods matched by label selectors.
- Ingress
- An API object that manages external HTTP/HTTPS access to cluster Services, typically providing routing rules and TLS termination via an Ingress controller.
- ConfigMap
- A Kubernetes object used to store non-confidential configuration data as key-value pairs, consumable by Pods as environment variables or mounted files.
- Secret
- A Kubernetes object for storing sensitive data such as passwords, tokens, or keys, base64-encoded and access-restricted separately from ConfigMaps.
- PersistentVolume (PV)
- A piece of storage provisioned in the cluster, either statically by an administrator or dynamically via a StorageClass, independent of any individual Pod's lifecycle.
- PersistentVolumeClaim (PVC)
- A user's request for storage that binds to a matching PersistentVolume, letting Pods consume storage without needing to know its underlying implementation.
- StorageClass
- A resource that defines a category of storage with a specific provisioner and parameters, enabling on-demand dynamic provisioning of PersistentVolumes.
- Namespace
- A logical partition within a Kubernetes cluster used to isolate and organize groups of resources, commonly by team, project, or environment.
- Taint
- A property applied to a node that repels Pods from being scheduled onto it unless those Pods have a matching toleration.
- Toleration
- A Pod-level setting that allows (but does not require) the Pod to be scheduled onto nodes with matching taints.
- NetworkPolicy
- A namespace-scoped resource that defines rules governing which Pods may communicate with each other and with external endpoints, enforced by the cluster's CNI plugin.
- kubeadm
- The official Kubernetes CLI tool for bootstrapping control-plane nodes, joining worker nodes to a cluster, and performing cluster upgrades.