A Pod is the atomic unit of scheduling in Kubernetes. It represents a running process in your cluster and serves as a wrapper for one or more containers, along with their shared storage and network resources. Since all containerized applications run inside Pods, understanding how to create and manage them is a foundational skill for working with Kubernetes.

This chapter provides a technical guide to managing Pods. We will begin with the Pod abstraction itself and how to define its specification using a YAML manifest. You will learn to create both single-container and multi-container Pods, understand the lifecycle phases a Pod moves through, and use kubectl for common operations like inspection and debugging. Finally, we will configure liveness and readiness probes to help Kubernetes automatically manage your application's health.