Pods
"Pods are the smallest deployable units of computing that you can create and manage in Kubernetes."
-- The Kubernetes team
A Pod is the smallest and simplest unit in the Kubernetes object model that you create or deploy. It represents one (or sometimes more) running container(s) in a cluster. In a simple web application, you might have one single pod: the web server. As traffic grows, you might deploy that same code to multiple pods to handle the increased load. Several pods, one codebase. In a more complex backend system, you might have several pods for the web server and several pods that handle video processing. Multiple pods, multiple codebases.
Pods are just wrappers around containers. You can think of it as a Docker container with a little extra Kubernetes magic. The container is the actual application, and the Pod is the Kubernetes abstraction that manages the container and the resources it needs to run.
Assignment
Let's deploy a second pod!
Use the kubectl get pods again to see a list of all your running pods. You should still only see the one synergychat-web pod. Let's add a second instance!
Run kubectl edit deployment synergychat-web to edit the deployment. This will open the deployment in your default text editor. You should see a big 'ol yaml file. This is the configuration of your deployment. Under the "spec" section, you should see the replicas field set to 1. Change it to 2, save the file, and close the editor.
spec:
...
replicas: 2
...
Run kubectl get pods again. You should see two pods now!
Tips
If you want to set VS Code as your default text editor, you can add:
export EDITOR="code -w"
to your .zshrc or .bashrc file, and restart your terminal. code is the command to open VS Code, and -w tells it to wait until you're done editing the file before continuing.