What Are the Relationships Between Images, Containers, and Workloads?

• Image: A container image is a special file system that includes all the programs, libraries, resources, and configuration files for running containers. It also includes some required configuration parameters, such as anonymous volumes, environment variables, and users. An image does not contain any dynamic data, and its content remains unchanged after being built.
• Container: A container is a runtime instance of an image. The relationship between an image and a container is similar to that between a class and an instance in the object-oriented program design. A container can be created, started, stopped, deleted, or suspended.
• A workload is an application running on Kubernetes and consists of one or more pods. A pod consists of one or more containers. Each container is created from a container image.

The following figure shows the relationships between images, containers, and workloads.

Figure 1 Relationships between images, containers, and workloads