Intro: So… What Powers the Kubernetes Brain? Everyone loves to show off their YAML-fu and talk about Pods and Deployments, but what’s actually running behind the scenes? What's keeping track of all your services, secrets, and scheduled chaos? Today I'd like to bring your a quick introduction about the Kubernetes control plane components—the brains of the operation. It’s made of several server-side components that work together like an orchestra of background daemons with trust issues and strict roles. In this post, we’ll demystify each core server running in a Kubernetes control plane:✅ etcd✅ kube-apiserver✅ kube-scheduler✅ kube-controller-manager✅ cloud-controller-manager✅ kubelet✅ kube-proxy✅ coredns✅ Optional players (metrics-server, CRI, CSI, etc.) Let’s start with the foundation: how these pieces talk. 🧩 Kubernetes Architecture in a Nutshell Kubernetes has two main types of nodes: Control Plane Nodes (aka “masters”): run the brain (scheduler, API, etc.) Worker Nodes: run your actual workloads (pods) Think of the control plane as mission control and the worker nodes as spacecraft. One issues orders, the other executes. They talk over HTTP/gRPC and communicate securely via TLS. Now let’s break down the core components—what they are, what they do, and how they fit together. 🔐 1. Kubernetes Control Plane Components - etcd What it is:A distributed key-value store used to store all cluster data: objects, state, configs. Think of it as:The brain’s hard disk. What lives inside etcd? Pod definitions ConfigMaps Secrets Cluster state Node info RoleBindings, CRDs, everything Backed by:etcd (from CoreOS), written in Go, uses the Raft consensus algorithm for HA and consistency. Why it matters:You never talk to etcd…