Kubernetes Cheat Sheet

Updated 2026-04-27

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Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration platform originally developed by Google, now governed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. It automates the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications across clusters of machines, abstracting infrastructure complexity while maintaining declarative configuration and self-healing capabilities. Understanding Kubernetes requires recognizing that everything is managed through declarative YAML manifests describing desired state — the system continuously reconciles actual state to match, creating resilient distributed systems that can scale from development laptops to planet-scale infrastructure.

What This Cheat Sheet Covers

This topic spans 18 focused tables and 154 indexed concepts. Below is a complete table-by-table outline of this topic, spanning foundational concepts through advanced details.

Table 1: Core Architecture ComponentsTable 2: Workload ResourcesTable 3: Networking and Service DiscoveryTable 4: Configuration and Secrets ManagementTable 5: Storage and PersistenceTable 6: Scheduling and PlacementTable 7: Autoscaling and Resource ManagementTable 8: Health Checks and ProbesTable 9: Security and Access ControlTable 10: kubectl CommandsTable 11: Namespaces and Resource IsolationTable 12: Advanced Workload PatternsTable 13: Configuration Management ToolsTable 14: Deployment StrategiesTable 15: Observability and MonitoringTable 16: Container Network Interface (CNI)Table 17: Service MeshTable 18: Best Practices and Patterns

Table 1: Core Architecture Components

Every Kubernetes cluster splits into a control plane that makes decisions and worker nodes that run your containers. These are the moving parts behind that split — the API server as the single front door, etcd as the source of truth, the scheduler and controllers that drive desired state, and the kubelet and kube-proxy that do the work on each node. Knowing which piece does what is the foundation for debugging almost anything that goes wrong.

Component	Example	Description
kube-apiserver	`kubectl get pods`	• Front-end for the control plane — exposes the Kubernetes API, validates and processes all REST requests, and serves as the single source of truth for cluster state • all components communicate through it.
etcd	Stores cluster state	• Distributed key-value store that holds all cluster data including configuration, secrets, and state • provides consistent and highly-available backing store for the entire cluster.
kube-scheduler	Assigns pods to nodes	• Decides which node runs each pod based on resource requirements, constraints, affinity rules, and available capacity • watches for newly created pods with no assigned node.
kube-controller-manager	Runs controllers	• Runs controller processes that regulate cluster state — includes node controller, replication controller, endpoints controller, and service account controller • each watches desired vs actual state.
kubelet	Runs on worker nodes	• Primary node agent that ensures containers are running in pods • communicates with the control plane, manages pod lifecycle, and reports node and pod status.

Table 1: Core Architecture Components

Component	Example	Description
kube-apiserver	`kubectl get pods`	• Front-end for the control plane — exposes the Kubernetes API, validates and processes all REST requests, and serves as the single source of truth for cluster state • all components communicate through it.
etcd	Stores cluster state	• Distributed key-value store that holds all cluster data including configuration, secrets, and state • provides consistent and highly-available backing store for the entire cluster.
kube-scheduler	Assigns pods to nodes	• Decides which node runs each pod based on resource requirements, constraints, affinity rules, and available capacity • watches for newly created pods with no assigned node.
kube-controller-manager	Runs controllers	• Runs controller processes that regulate cluster state — includes node controller, replication controller, endpoints controller, and service account controller • each watches desired vs actual state.
kubelet	Runs on worker nodes	• Primary node agent that ensures containers are running in pods • communicates with the control plane, manages pod lifecycle, and reports node and pod status.