kube-apiserver

The API server is a component of the Kubernetes control plane that exposes the Kubernetes API. The API server is the front end for the Kubernetes control plane.

The main implementation of a Kubernetes API server is kube-apiserver. kube-apiserver is designed to scale horizontally—that is, it scales by deploying more instances. You can run several instances of kube-apiserver and balance traffic between those instances.

etcd

Consistent and highly-available key value store used as Kubernetes’ backing store for all cluster data.

If your Kubernetes cluster uses etcd as its backing store, make sure you have a back up plan for those data.

You can find in-depth information about etcd in the official documentation.

kube-scheduler

Control plane component that watches for newly created Pods with no assigned node, and selects a node for them to run on.

Factors taken into account for scheduling decisions include: individual and collective resource requirements, hardware/software/policy constraints, affinity and anti-affinity specifications, data locality, inter-workload interference, and deadlines.

kube-controller-manager

Control plane component that runs controller processes.

Logically, each controller is a separate process, but to reduce complexity, they are all compiled into a single binary and run in a single process.

Some types of these controllers are:

• Node controller: Responsible for noticing and responding when nodes go down.
• Job controller: Watches for Job objects that represent one-off tasks, then creates Pods to run those tasks to completion.
• Endpoints controller: Populates the Endpoints object (that is, joins Services & Pods).
• Service Account & Token controllers: Create default accounts and API access tokens for new namespaces.