KubeCon + CloudNative North America 2021

Most introductory Kubernetes videos and blog posts use static block diagrams to illustrate the core components of Kubernetes and how they interact. These diagrams don’t convey the dynamic communication between the K8s control plane, nodes, and pods, and we owe it to ourselves and people new to the field more accurate and engaging ways of representing Kubernetes architecture. This talk will demonstrate a few different methods to visualize how Kubernetes components work together including a time-sequence diagram that models what happens when a user creates a pod using the Kubernetes command line tool, kubectl, and how to use Jaeger to see an http request move onto different nodes by traveling through a load balancer, to a service, and arriving at a specific pod. This talk is for people who are new to Kubernetes and want to understand how the system is designed, as well as experienced engineers who are curious about alternative ways of visualizing Kubernetes architecture.