This section of the Kubernetes documentation contains references.

API Reference

Officially supported client libraries

To call the Kubernetes API from a programming language, you can use client libraries. Officially supported client libraries:

CLI

  • kubectl - Main CLI tool for running commands and managing Kubernetes clusters.
  • kubeadm - CLI tool to easily provision a secure Kubernetes cluster.

Components

  • kubelet - The primary agent that runs on each node. The kubelet takes a set of PodSpecs and ensures that the described containers are running and healthy.

  • kube-apiserver - REST API that validates and configures data for API objects such as pods, services, replication controllers.

  • kube-controller-manager - Daemon that embeds the core control loops shipped with Kubernetes.

  • kube-proxy - Can do simple TCP/UDP stream forwarding or round-robin TCP/UDP forwarding across a set of back-ends.

  • kube-scheduler - Scheduler that manages availability, performance, and capacity.

  • List of ports and protocols that should be open on control plane and worker nodes

Config APIs

This section hosts the documentation for "unpublished" APIs which are used to configure kubernetes components or tools. Most of these APIs are not exposed by the API server in a RESTful way though they are essential for a user or an operator to use or manage a cluster.

Config API for kubeadm

Design Docs

An archive of the design docs for Kubernetes functionality. Good starting points are Kubernetes Architecture and Kubernetes Design Overview.

Last modified September 28, 2021 at 3:43 PM PST: Move kubectl overview to be section index (73cd38cdc6)