In Kubernetes, Services are an abstract way to expose an application running on a set of Pods. Services can have a cluster-scoped virtual IP address (using a Service of type: ClusterIP). Clients can connect using that virtual IP address, and Kubernetes then load-balances traffic to that Service across the different backing Pods. How Service ClusterIPs are allocated? When Kubernetes needs to assign a virtual IP address for a Service, that assignment happens one of two ways:

You can visualize and manage Kubernetes objects with more tools than kubectl and the dashboard. A common set of labels allows tools to work interoperably, describing objects in a common manner that all tools can understand. In addition to supporting tooling, the recommended labels describe applications in a way that can be queried. The metadata is organized around the concept of an application. Kubernetes is not a platform as a service (PaaS) and doesn't have or enforce a formal notion of an application.

This page describes running Kubernetes across multiple zones. Background Kubernetes is designed so that a single Kubernetes cluster can run across multiple failure zones, typically where these zones fit within a logical grouping called a region. Major cloud providers define a region as a set of failure zones (also called availability zones) that provide a consistent set of features: within a region, each zone offers the same APIs and services.

This page explains the two options for configuring the topology of your highly available (HA) Kubernetes clusters. You can set up an HA cluster: With stacked control plane nodes, where etcd nodes are colocated with control plane nodes With external etcd nodes, where etcd runs on separate nodes from the control plane You should carefully consider the advantages and disadvantages of each topology before setting up an HA cluster.

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.23 [stable] Your Kubernetes cluster includes dual-stack networking, which means that cluster networking lets you use either address family. In a cluster, the control plane can assign both an IPv4 address and an IPv6 address to a single Pod or a Service. Before you begin You need to have installed the kubeadm tool, following the steps from Installing kubeadm. For each server that you want to use as a node, make sure it allows IPv6 forwarding.

A cluster is a set of nodes (physical or virtual machines) running Kubernetes agents, managed by the control plane. Kubernetes v1.32 supports clusters with up to 5,000 nodes. More specifically, Kubernetes is designed to accommodate configurations that meet all of the following criteria: No more than 110 pods per node No more than 5,000 nodes No more than 150,000 total pods No more than 300,000 total containers You can scale your cluster by adding or removing nodes.

This document catalogs the communication paths between the API server and the Kubernetes cluster. The intent is to allow users to customize their installation to harden the network configuration such that the cluster can be run on an untrusted network (or on fully public IPs on a cloud provider). Node to Control Plane Kubernetes has a "hub-and-spoke" API pattern. All API usage from nodes (or the pods they run) terminates at the API server.

This website contains documentation for the current version of Kubernetes and the four previous versions of Kubernetes. The availability of documentation for a Kubernetes version is separate from whether that release is currently supported. Read Support period to learn about which versions of Kubernetes are officially supported, and for how long.

Production-Grade Container Orchestration

Device plugins let you configure your cluster with support for devices or resources that require vendor-specific setup, such as GPUs, NICs, FPGAs, or non-volatile main memory.