ITGSS Certified DevOps Engineer Practice Test

Which component of Kubernetes acts as the agent that ensures containers are running in a pod?

1. kubelet

2. kube-proxy

3. etcd

4. cloud-controller-manager

The correct answer is: kubelet

The kubelet is the primary component of Kubernetes responsible for ensuring that containers are running as intended within a pod. The kubelet acts as an agent on each node in the cluster, monitoring the state of the containers, ensuring that they are healthy, and starting or restarting them as necessary based on the desired state defined in the pod specifications. It communicates with the Kubernetes API server to receive the desired state of pods scheduled on its node and performs the necessary actions to achieve that state. This includes managing the lifecycle of containers, handling their logs, and reporting back the status of the pod to the Kubernetes control plane. Other components mentioned, such as kube-proxy, are responsible for networking and service discovery, etcd serves as the persistent storage for the cluster's state, and the cloud-controller-manager integrates with cloud service providers to manage resources as needed. Each of these components plays a critical role in the Kubernetes ecosystem, but it is the kubelet that directly interacts with the containers within pods to ensure they are actively running.