What is a Pod?
The Pod is the simplest compute resource in Kubernetes. It specifies one or more containers to be started and run by the Kubernetes scheduler on a node. Pods have many potential configurations and extensions but remain the most basic way to run applications on Kubernetes.
Important note
A Pod by itself is not a very good way to run applications on Kubernetes. Pods should be treated like fdisposable things in order to take advantage of the true capabilities of a container orchestrator like Kubernetes. This means treating containers (and therefore Pods) like cattle, not pets. To really make use of containers and Kubernetes, applications should be run in self-healing, scalable groups. The Pod is the building block of these groups, and we'll get into how to configure applications this way in later chapters.