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Worker Nodes

A worker node in Kubernetes is a machine, physical or virtual, that runs containerized applications.

Minions

Worker nodes are also known as "Minions".

Each node is managed by the control plane and is composed by several key components.
Node

kubelet

The kubelet is an agent that receives instructions from the control plane and ensures that the assigned pods are running and healthy. If a container crashes, the kubelet restarts it locally without involving the control plane.

kube-proxy

The kube-proxy is a process that manages networking rules, ensuring traffic is correctly routed to the right pods regardless of which worker node they are running on.

Container runtime

The container runtime is the actual engine that runs containers. Kubernetes doesn’t care which one.