Pod

A Pod is the smallest thing you can deploy in Kubernetes. Think of it as a wrapper around one or more containers that need to run together. They share the same network IP, can talk to each other, and have access to the same storage volumes.

Most of the time you will run a single container per Pod. But when you need multiple containers working together, Pods support different patterns: init containers run first to handle setup before your main app starts, sidecars run alongside your app for things like log collection or service mesh proxies, and ephemeral containers can be attached later when you need to debug a running Pod.