Worker Nodes
Worker nodes are the machines in a Kubernetes cluster that run your containerized applications. They are responsible for executing the workloads scheduled by the control plane, maintaining network rules, and providing the runtime environment for containers.
Key Components
Worker nodes consist of several essential components:
- kubelet: The primary node agent that communicates with the control plane and ensures containers are running in a Pod.
- Container Runtime: Software responsible for running containers (like containerd, CRI-O).
- kube-proxy: Maintains network rules on nodes to enable network communication to Pods.
Worker Node Architecture
Each worker node in a Kubernetes cluster maintains the runtime environment for containers and handles local node-level operations. Worker nodes don’t manage the cluster state or scheduling decisions - those responsibilities belong to the control plane.
Worker nodes are where your application workloads actually run, making them a critical part of any Kubernetes deployment.