Contents
Planes of Operation
I joined the Elastic Kubernetes Service at AWS in late 2024 and by then I was only familiar with the application layer of Kubernetes. As part of my induction to the team, the first concept that was drilled into me was the planes of operation: the control plane and the data plane. Here is a mental model that I use:
The boxes in the diagram may feel unfamiliar to those without a Kubernetes background and that is alright. In the next few sections I will make this diagram a little more "explorable" in different ways and it will help readers grok Kubernetes.
The first section will be on "Pods", which is perhaps a concept that is easy to wrangle for those who are Kubernetes users.
Pods
A pod is the smallest deployable computation on Kubernetes. It's also valuable to
understand what a pod is not. A binary doom.exe stored somewhere on
cloud-storage or a hard-disk would be further away from the concept of a pod than that
binary running on a pregnancy test kitnote"It's Pregnancy Test Doom!" (Foone Turing), from This Programmer Figured Out How to Play Doom on a Pregnancy Test, Popular Mechanics, 2020..
A pod captures how software is run. We'll dive deep into the internals of the pod later but for now here is the anatomy of a pod manifest:
Now let's watch kubectl apply -f pod.yaml actually happen. Step through
it below: the top diagram lights up whichever component is doing something, and the
terminal, audit log, and etcd tabs underneath all update in lockstep, since they are
three views of the same one event stream.
Try it: step forward or backward and watch how the state across the terminal, API Server and etcd changes. Most Kubernetes users have only observed the Terminal tab.
Control Plane
More explanations will land in this section as the blog evolves over time.
Data Plane
Anatomy of a (EKS) Worker NodenoteIllustrated here with the EKS AL2023 AMI build, since its source is public: awslabs/amazon-eks-ami, which I maintain. The layering is generic to any Kubernetes worker node, EKS is just the concrete, inspectable example.
How Pods Run
Pod Networking on the Node
Cite asShiv Bhosale, "Everything I know about Kubernetes", notes.shvbsle.in, 2026. notes.shvbsle.in/kubernetes
BibTeX
@misc{bhosale2026kubernetes,
author = {Bhosale, Shiv},
title = {Everything I know about Kubernetes},
year = {2026},
url = {https://notes.shvbsle.in/kubernetes/}
}