beginner · ~5 min

Your first pod

A pod is the smallest thing Kubernetes runs: one or more containers that share a network address and are scheduled onto a node together. You rarely make pods by hand in production — but every higher-level object ends up making pods, so this is where to start.

kubectl run NAME --image=IMAGE asks the API server for a pod. It answers straight away; the scheduler then picks a node, and that node's kubelet pulls the image and starts the container. Watch the pod move from Pending to ContainerCreating to Running.

Objectives

Run a pod called web from the image nginx:1.27
Check on it with kubectl get pods
Bonus: Find out which node the scheduler put it on

Best on a computer with a keyboard. It works on a phone, with shortcuts under the terminal.