5.7 Summary

In this chapter, you’ve learned:

• Pods run one or more containers as a co-located group. They are the unit of deployment and horizontal scaling. A typical container runs only one process. Sidecar containers complement the primary container in the pod.
• Containers should only be part of the same pod if they must run together. A frontend and a backend process should run in separate pods. This allows them to be scaled individually.
• When a pod starts, its init containers run one after the other. When the last init container completes, the pod’s main containers are started. You can use an init container to configure the pod from within, delay startup of its main containers until a precondition is met, or notify an external service that the pod is about to start running.
• The kubectl tool is used to create pods, view their logs, copy files to/from their containers, execute commands in those containers and enable communication with individual pods during development.

In the next chapter, you’ll learn about the lifecycle of the pod and its containers.