Kubernetes has a lot of moving parts, and I'm trying to understand how they connect. Could someone explain the roles of the kubelet, a Kubernetes cluster, Helm, and what people mean by drivers—especially storage or CSI drivers? I'd also appreciate a simple overview of how Kubernetes manages containerized applications across multiple machines.
3 Answers
Helm is not part of Kubernetes’ core control plane. It’s a packaging and deployment tool for applications that need several Kubernetes resources, such as Deployments, Services, and configuration settings. A Helm chart bundles those YAML templates and values into something you can install and customize as one application release.
A Kubernetes cluster is the complete system: the control plane plus one or more worker nodes. The control plane makes decisions and stores the desired configuration, while worker nodes run the application workloads. A pod is Kubernetes’ basic deployment unit and contains one or more containers. For example, a Deployment can say, “keep three copies of this pod running,” and Kubernetes will create replacements if one fails.
The kubelet is the agent running on each worker node. It receives instructions through the Kubernetes API, starts or stops containers through the container runtime, and reports the node and pod status back to the control plane. Kubernetes works as a reconciliation loop: you declare the desired state, and controllers continuously compare it with reality and try to correct any differences.
So the control plane is more like the coordinator, rather than directly running every container itself?