FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.25 [stable] This page provides an overview of ephemeral containers: a special type of container that runs temporarily in an existing Pod to accomplish user-initiated actions such as troubleshooting. You use ephemeral containers to inspect services rather than to build applications. Understanding ephemeral containers Pods are the fundamental building block of Kubernetes applications. Since Pods are intended to be disposable and replaceable, you cannot add a container to a Pod once it has been created.

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.

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.

Kubernetes runs your workload by placing containers into Pods to run on Nodes. A node may be a virtual or physical machine, depending on the cluster. Each node is managed by the control plane and contains the services necessary to run Pods. Typically you have several nodes in a cluster; in a learning or resource-limited environment, you might have only one node. The components on a node include the kubelet, a container runtime, and the kube-proxy.

FEATURE STATE: Kubernetes v1.29 [beta] Sidecar containers are the secondary containers that run along with the main application container within the same Pod. These containers are used to enhance or to extend the functionality of the primary app container by providing additional services, or functionality such as logging, monitoring, security, or data synchronization, without directly altering the primary application code. Typically, you only have one app container in a Pod.

Concepts and resources behind networking in Kubernetes.

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:

When several users or teams share a cluster with a fixed number of nodes, there is a concern that one team could use more than its fair share of resources. Resource quotas are a tool for administrators to address this concern. A resource quota, defined by a ResourceQuota object, provides constraints that limit aggregate resource consumption per namespace. It can limit the quantity of objects that can be created in a namespace by type, as well as the total amount of compute resources that may be consumed by resources in that namespace.

Kubernetes lets you configure single-stack IPv4 networking, single-stack IPv6 networking, or dual stack networking with both network families active. This page explains how.

Removed feature PodSecurityPolicy was deprecated in Kubernetes v1.21, and removed from Kubernetes in v1.25. Instead of using PodSecurityPolicy, you can enforce similar restrictions on Pods using either or both: Pod Security Admission a 3rd party admission plugin, that you deploy and configure yourself For a migration guide, see Migrate from PodSecurityPolicy to the Built-In PodSecurity Admission Controller. For more information on the removal of this API, see PodSecurityPolicy Deprecation: Past, Present, and Future.