What Is Kubernetes Pods

Anish Antony
12 min readFeb 22, 2022

In this article, we are looking into the details of Kubernetes pods. The pods are the basic units of Kubernetes. The docker containers are placed inside the pod. In this article, let’s understand the concept of Kubernetes pods theoretically as well as practically.

Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash

What is a pod?

The Pods are the basic deployable units of Kubernetes. All remaining Kubernetes components are built on top of Pod. In a Pod, it contains one or more Docker containers and in the Docker container, we are deploying our application. Also, we can deploy one or more applications in the Docker container.

But why do we need the Pod? The Docker container is enough for containerization? Actually, what Kubernetes does? When I heard about Kubernetes first time, these all questions come to my mind. I am really confused about Kubernetes and Docker.

The Docker is used to containerize your application. The Kubernetes is used for managing the containers. This means using Kubernetes you can manage network configuration between the containers, Shared storage configuration for the containers, setting replication factor and can define the deployment structure of your application.

Comes to Kubernetes structure, the basic unit of Kubernetes is Pod. A Pod can contain one or more docker containers. Using Pods, it can configure shared storage and network resources.

The above diagram explains different examples of pods. The Pods are started inside of the Kubernetes node. A node is a single server where the Kubernetes is installed. The Kubernetes environment(Kubernetes cluster) consists of one or more nodes. Inside the node, it can configure any number of Pods. Also, the Pod can have different sizes. You can configure any number of containers inside the Pod. In the above diagram, you can see different Pods with the different\ numbers of containers. The Pods are assigned with a single IP address.

An exciting thing about the Kubernetes pod is that we can set a restart policy for the Pod configuration. So if the Pod unexpectedly stopped or terminated. The Kubernetes will automatically start a new Pod instead…

Anish Antony

Fullstack Developer | Blogger | Experience on Java, Python, React, Angular, Golang | http://www.behindjava.com