last updated: January 2026
The blog Learn Kubernetes Architecture the Easy way is been written in a very simple way to make everyone easily understand the overall architecture of Kubernetes.
Before understanding the architecture of Kubernetes, lets get an overview of what actually Kubernetes is.
What is Kubernetes? (A Simple explaination)
Imagine you are a developer and created an app, like a website or a game. To make it run on a computer devices what we do is that we package the app into a docker container. Now if your app gets popular you might need hundreds of these docker containers to run at once on many computers. To manage these hundreds of containers at once manually would be a headache: starting the containers, stopping the containers, fixing the crashed containers, load balancing the traffic, adding more containers when traffic increases.
That’s where Kubernetes comes in. Kubernetes is like an automatic lifecycle manager for the containers.
Kubernetes Architecture: A Simplified Design
Let me explain you the kubernetes architecture by taking an example of a busy restaurant. Image kubernetes as a manager of the kitchen in restaurant. There are chefs (containers running apps). Manager(kubernetes) makes sure that everything is running smoothly in the kitchen.
A Kubernetes cluster has two important parts:
- Control Plane – [The Brain/Manager’s Office]
This is the most important part, you can call it as the ‘boss’ part. It dosen’t actually runs the apps but make descision for the apps and stores information.
It has following key components:
- API Server: A door – Everything talks to the cluster through this door
- Scheduler: Descides which new “task”(pods) to be assigned to which “Kitchen station”(worker nodes).
- Controller manager: Watches and perform fixes – e.g: If your want 2 copies of app and currently you have 1 then it makes sure that the app has 2 copies.
- etcd: you can call it as a notebook which stores cluster’s important info and configurations.
Here is more simplified view of the Kubernetes Cluster
2. Worker Node – [The Kitchen Station]
Worker nodes are nothing but the machines on which your app runs. These machines are Virtual or Physical. Key pieces of each worker node:
- Kublet: Its a local manager which talks to the control plane and makes sure that the tasks(pods) are running without any errors.
- Container Runtime: Its an engine which is responsible for running the containers, It actually runs your containers.
- Kube Proxy: Handles the networking and communication part between the containers across entire cluster.
Here is more simplified view of what runs on the worker node
The smallest thing which kubernetes manages is a pod which contains one or more containers packed into it.
Pods which consist application containers are always placed on the worker nodes.
A Real World Use Case of Kubernetes
Netflix server millions of users and thousands of movies and shows daily. It receives traffic from all over the world and their are spikes during the new releases. Running this on a fixed server is almost impossible.
Netflix problem before using kubernetes was that it used to receive massive traffic spikes, frequent deployments were there due to new movies and shows releases. Their was global availability requirements.
To tackle these issues Netflix decided to run thousands of microservices using containers and orchestration platform(including kubernetes).
Each major netflix function such as user login, Movie catalog, Search has as separate service available.
Kubernetes helps netflix to scale, deploy and recover automatically while serving millions of users worldwide.
To summarize the Kubernetes architecture in short: The control plane runs components which plans the scheduling, monitoring, keeping cluster into desired state, storing the information, and worker node is one on which pod gets scheduled and runs successfully. This setup enables the kubernetes platform to automatically manage, scale and orchestrate thousands and millions of containers effortlessly.
If you want to dig deeper into each components of kubernetes please let me know in the comment section.