A pod is the smallest execution unit in Kubernetes. A pod encapsulates one or more applications. Pods are ephemeral by nature, if a pod (or the node it executes on) fails, Kubernetes can automatically create a new replica of that pod to continue operations. Pods include one or more containers (such as Docker containers). Pods also provide environmental dependencies, including persistent storage volumes (storage that is permanent and available to all pods in the cluster) and configuration data needed to run the container(s) within the pod.