Kubernetes Concepts for Azure
Review core Kubernetes constructs — pods, deployments, services, and namespaces — and understand how AKS manages the control plane on your behalf.
What Is Kubernetes?
Kubernetes (K8s) is an open-source container orchestration platform originally developed by Google. It automates the deployment, scaling, and management of containerised applications. Rather than running containers manually, you declare the desired state of your application in YAML manifests, and Kubernetes continuously works to match the actual state to the desired state — restarting failed containers, scheduling workloads on healthy nodes, and scaling replicas.
Cluster Architecture: Control Plane and Nodes
A Kubernetes cluster consists of a control plane and worker nodes. The control plane contains the API server (entry point for all kubectl commands), etcd (distributed state store), scheduler (assigns pods to nodes), and controller manager (maintains desired state). Worker nodes run the kubelet (node agent), kube-proxy (network rules), and a container runtime (containerd). In AKS, Microsoft manages the control plane — you only manage the worker nodes.
# Kubernetes control plane components
# kube-apiserver - REST API for all cluster operations
# etcd - Distributed key-value store (cluster state)
# kube-scheduler - Assigns pending pods to nodes
# kube-controller-manager - Runs reconciliation controllers
# Worker node components
# kubelet - Node agent, ensures containers run
# kube-proxy - Network routing for services
# containerd - Container runtime (runs containers)All lessons in this course
- Azure Container Registry
- Azure Container Instances
- Kubernetes Concepts for Azure
- Deploying Workloads on AKS