FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.30 [stable] Pods were considered ready for scheduling once created. Kubernetes scheduler does its due diligence to find nodes to place all pending Pods. However, in a real-world case, some Pods may stay in a "miss-essential-resources" state for a long period. These Pods actually churn the scheduler (and downstream integrators like Cluster AutoScaler) in an unnecessary manner. By specifying/removing a Pod's .spec.schedulingGates, you can control when a Pod is ready to be considered for scheduling.

You can constrain a Pod so that it is restricted to run on particular node(s), or to prefer to run on particular nodes. There are several ways to do this and the recommended approaches all use label selectors to facilitate the selection. Often, you do not need to set any such constraints; the scheduler will automatically do a reasonable placement (for example, spreading your Pods across nodes so as not place Pods on a node with insufficient free resources).

The EndpointSlice API is the mechanism that Kubernetes uses to let your Service scale to handle large numbers of backends, and allows the cluster to update its list of healthy backends efficiently.

_Topology Aware Routing_ provides a mechanism to help keep network traffic within the zone where it originated. Preferring same-zone traffic between Pods in your cluster can help with reliability, performance (network latency and throughput), or cost.

This document describes ephemeral volumes in Kubernetes. Familiarity with volumes is suggested, in particular PersistentVolumeClaim and PersistentVolume. Some applications need additional storage but don't care whether that data is stored persistently across restarts. For example, caching services are often limited by memory size and can move infrequently used data into storage that is slower than memory with little impact on overall performance. Other applications expect some read-only input data to be present in files, like configuration data or secret keys.

This guide is for application owners who want to build highly available applications, and thus need to understand what types of disruptions can happen to Pods. It is also for cluster administrators who want to perform automated cluster actions, like upgrading and autoscaling clusters. Voluntary and involuntary disruptions Pods do not disappear until someone (a person or a controller) destroys them, or there is an unavoidable hardware or system software error.

In order for an [Ingress](/docs/concepts/services-networking/ingress/) to work in your cluster, there must be an _ingress controller_ running. You need to select at least one ingress controller and make sure it is set up in your cluster. This page lists common ingress controllers that you can deploy.

Windows applications constitute a large portion of the services and applications that run in many organizations. Windows containers provide a way to encapsulate processes and package dependencies, making it easier to use DevOps practices and follow cloud native patterns for Windows applications. Organizations with investments in Windows-based applications and Linux-based applications don't have to look for separate orchestrators to manage their workloads, leading to increased operational efficiencies across their deployments, regardless of operating system.

Production-Grade Container Orchestration

Note: This section links to third party projects that provide functionality required by Kubernetes. The Kubernetes project authors aren't responsible for these projects, which are listed alphabetically. To add a project to this list, read the content guide before submitting a change. More information. Add-ons extend the functionality of Kubernetes. This page lists some of the available add-ons and links to their respective installation instructions. The list does not try to be exhaustive.