Updated on 2025-06-16 GMT+08:00

Overview

What Is a Pod?

Pods are the smallest deployable units of computing that you can create and manage. A pod is a group of one or more containers, with shared storage, a unique IP address, and a specification for how to run the containers.

Pods can be used in either of the following ways:

  • A pod runs a single container. This is the most common use case. You can consider a pod as a wrapper around a single container. Pods can be managed directly rather than containers.
  • A pod runs multiple containers that need to work together. In this scenario, a pod can encapsulate an application that is running in a main container and several sidecar containers. As shown in Figure 1, the main container serves as a web server that provides file services from a fixed directory, and the sidecar container periodically downloads files to the directory.
    Figure 1 Pod