Kubernetes in Five Minutes
A self-inflicted challenge because I heard people dig Kubernetes in 2020
5 min readNov 29, 2020
“If you can’t explain it simply enough, you don’t understand it well enough”.
Challenge accepted. Here’s my attempt to explain native components of Kubernetes in five minutes with the objective of covering concepts and resource types that will enable you to t̶a̶l̶k̶ ̶a̶b̶o̶u̶t̶ ̶K̶u̶b̶e̶r̶n̶e̶t̶e̶s̶ ̶l̶i̶k̶e̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶u̶n̶d̶e̶r̶s̶t̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶i̶t̶ understand Kubernetes and deploy applications at a basic level.
As a pretext, I’ve found it useful to think of Kubernetes-related work not as a collection of verbose YAML files defining strange kinds of resources, but as a set of abstractions representing common design patterns in application deployment.
To me, the areas that Kubernetes natively accounts for in logical — imo — order are:
- Hardware – Node
- Orchestration – Deployment, Job, CronJob, StatefulSet, DaemonSet
- Configuration – ConfigMap, Secret
- Persistence — PersistentVolumeClaim, PersistentVolume
- Execution – Pod, ReplicaSet
- Access Control – Namespace, ServiceAccount, Role, ClusterRole
