Augmenting pods

You’ve just learned that pods wrap one or more containers and add capabilities. However, pods don’t self-heal, they don’t autoscale, and they don’t do things like zero-downtime rollouts. Kubernetes has higher-level controllers that wrap around pods and implement these features. As a result, you’ll almost always deploy pods via higher level controllers such as deployments and statefulsets.

You’ll learn more about controllers later in the chapter. But for now, let’s consider a simple example of deploying a stateless web server.

Your development team writes a stateless web app and packages it as a container. You know you need 5 instances to meet expected demand, and as you’re running a Kubernetes environment you need to wrap each container in a pod. However, pods aren’t resilient. For example, if you deploy 5 standalone pods and a node hosting 2 of them fails, there’s no intelligence to recreate them...