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Building a Kubernetes Pod

 

Pod is the first Kubernetes object you will learn. The Kubernetes website describes a pod as:

A pod (as in a pod of whales or pea pod) is a group of one or more containers (such as Docker containers), with shared storage/network, and a specification for how to run the containers.

Meaning:

  • Pod is essentially a group of containers.

  • All containers in a pod share storage and network resources.

So what’s the benefit of using pod compared to the old way of dealing with each individual container? Let’s consider a simple use case: you are deploying a web service with Docker and you need not only the frontend service, for example an Apache server, but also some supporting services like a database server, a logging server, a monitoring server, and so forth. Each of these supporting services needs to be running in its own container. So essentially you find yourself always working with a group of docks whenever a web service container is needed. In production, the same scenario applies to most of the other services as well. Eventually you ask: is there a way to group a bunch of Docker containers in a higher-level unit, so you only need to worry once about the low-level inter-container interaction details?

Pod gives the exact higher-level abstraction you need by wrapping one or more containers into one object. If your web service becomes too popular and a single pod instance can’t carry the load, you can replicate and scale the same group of containers (now in the form of one pod object) up and down very easily with the help of other objects (RC, deployment) - normally in a few seconds. This sharply increases deployment and maintenance efficiency.

In addition, containers in the same pod share the same network space, so containers can easily communicate with other containers in the same pod as though they were on the same machine, while maintaining a degree of isolation from others. You can read more about these advantages later in this book.

Now, let’s get our feet wet and learn how to use a configuration file to launch a pod in a Kubernetes cluster.