Manifests

What are Manifests?

Kubernetes must know how to manage various resources. It does this through manifests. A manifest is like a set of instructions in order. This is similar to a step-by-step guide. Manifests are created in YAML, which is a human-readable configuration syntax.

Manifests contain instructions on what to build for an application to run such as but among many others:

• How many containers to provision
• Ports to open
• Files to copy to containers
• Commands to run

Manifests are the marching orders Kubernetes follows to get work done.

An example manifest

It’s hard to understand what a manifest looks like without actually seeing one. In the following code snippet, you can see a basic manifest that builds an Nginx container. Nginx is a web server much like IIS, except Nginx runs on any Linux distribution.