Getting Started with Pods

Understanding Pods

Pods are equivalent to bricks that we use to build houses. Both are uneventful and not much by themselves. Yet, they are fundamental building blocks without which we could not construct the solution we are set to build.

If you have used Docker or Docker Swarm, you’re probably used to thinking that a container is the smallest unit and that more complex patterns are built on top of it. With Kubernetes, the smallest unit is a Pod.

Note: A Pod is a way to represent a running process in a cluster.

From Kubernetes’ perspective, there’s nothing smaller than a Pod.

A Pod encapsulates one or more containers. It provides a unique network IP, attaches storage resources, and decides how containers should run. Everything in a Pod is tightly coupled.

We should clarify that containers in a Pod are not necessarily made by Docker. Other container runtimes are supported as well. Docker is, however, one of the most commonly used container runtimes, and we’ll use it in all our examples.

Since we cannot create Pods without a Kubernetes cluster, our first order of business is to a Kubernetes cluster.

Creating a cluster

In this course, we use the k3d clusters on our platform. k3d is an open-source wrapper to run lightweight K3s clusters on Docker containers.

Note: For you to practice this course on the Educative platform, all necessary toolkits and installations have been taken care of. However, if you want to experiment with clusters on your local machine, please refer to the appendix section of this course.

We’ll use the k3d cluster create command to create

The output of the latter command is as follows:

Run the above commands in the Terminal below. Make sure to connect the terminal by clicking Click to Connect before executing any commands.