Cloud Glossary: Letter K

Navigation: A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z

K

Kafka

A distributed streaming platform designed for building real-time data pipelines and streaming applications.

KMS (Key Management Service)

A managed service for creating and controlling encryption keys used to encrypt data across cloud services.

Kubernetes

An open-source container orchestration platform that automates deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.

Key Pair

A pair of cryptographic keys consisting of a public key and a private key used for secure communication and authentication.

Key Rotation

The practice of regularly changing cryptographic keys to limit the impact of a potential key compromise.

Key Vault

A cloud service for securely storing and accessing secrets, keys, passwords, certificates, and other sensitive information.

Kibana

An open-source data visualization dashboard for Elasticsearch, providing search and data visualization capabilities.

Kinesis

Amazon's platform for collecting, processing, and analyzing real-time streaming data at scale.

Kubectl

A command-line tool for communicating with the Kubernetes API server to deploy and manage applications on Kubernetes.

Kustomize

A Kubernetes-native configuration management tool that introduces a template-free way to customize application configuration.

Keep-Alive

A communication option that maintains a connection between client and server, reducing the overhead of establishing new connections.

Key Management

The administration of cryptographic keys in a cryptosystem, including generation, exchange, storage, and deletion.

Keystore

A repository where private keys, certificates, and symmetric keys can be stored securely for cryptographic operations.

Kubernetes Cluster

A set of worker machines called nodes that run containerized applications managed by the Kubernetes control plane.

Kubernetes Pod

The smallest deployable unit in Kubernetes that can hold one or more containers with shared storage and network.

Kubernetes Service

An abstraction that defines a logical set of pods and a policy for accessing them, providing stable networking.

K8s

Common abbreviation for Kubernetes (K + 8 letters + s), the container orchestration platform.

Knative

A Kubernetes-based platform for deploying and managing modern serverless workloads and event-driven applications.

Kong

An open-source API gateway and microservices management layer that provides authentication, rate limiting, and monitoring.

Kerberos

A network authentication protocol that uses strong cryptography to provide secure authentication over non-secure networks.

Kubernetes Ingress

An API object that manages external access to services in a cluster, typically HTTP and HTTPS routing.

Kubernetes Namespace

A way to divide cluster resources between multiple users or teams, providing scope for names and resource quotas.

Kubeconfig

A configuration file used by kubectl and other clients to locate and authenticate to Kubernetes clusters.

Kubelet

An agent that runs on each node in a Kubernetes cluster, ensuring containers are running in pods as expected.

Kubernetes Deployment

A resource that provides declarative updates to pods and replica sets, managing the deployment and scaling of applications.

Kubernetes ConfigMap

An API object used to store non-confidential data in key-value pairs that can be consumed by pods.

Kubernetes Secret

An object that contains sensitive data such as passwords, OAuth tokens, and SSH keys in a secure way.

Kube-proxy

A network proxy that runs on each node in a Kubernetes cluster, implementing part of the Kubernetes Service concept.

Kubernetes API Server

The front end of the Kubernetes control plane that exposes the Kubernetes API and handles RESTful requests.

Kubernetes Controller

Control loops that watch the state of the cluster and make changes to move the current state toward the desired state.

Kubernetes Scheduler

A control plane component that assigns pods to nodes based on resource requirements and constraints.

Key Derivation Function (KDF)

A cryptographic function that derives one or more secret keys from a secret value using a pseudorandom function.

Kubernetes Operator

A method of packaging, deploying, and managing Kubernetes applications using custom resources and controllers.

Kubernetes Helm

A package manager for Kubernetes that helps define, install, and upgrade complex Kubernetes applications.

Kubernetes DaemonSet

A workload that ensures all or some nodes run a copy of a pod, typically used for node-level services.

Kubernetes StatefulSet

A workload API object used to manage stateful applications, providing guarantees about ordering and uniqueness.

Kubernetes Job

A workload that runs pods to completion, ensuring a specified number of successful completions.

Kubernetes CronJob

A workload that creates jobs on a repeating schedule, similar to cron jobs in Unix-like operating systems.

Kubernetes Volume

A directory that is accessible to containers in a pod, providing persistent storage beyond the pod lifecycle.

Kubernetes PersistentVolume

A piece of storage in the cluster that has been provisioned by an administrator or dynamically using storage classes.

Kubernetes PersistentVolumeClaim

A request for storage by a user that can be fulfilled by a persistent volume with matching characteristics.

Kubernetes Network Policy

A specification of how groups of pods are allowed to communicate with each other and other network endpoints.

Kubernetes Resource Quota

A constraint that limits aggregate resource consumption per namespace to prevent resource monopolization.

Kubernetes Horizontal Pod Autoscaler

A controller that automatically scales the number of pods based on observed CPU utilization or custom metrics.

Kubernetes Vertical Pod Autoscaler

A controller that automatically adjusts CPU and memory requests for containers to optimize resource utilization.

Kubernetes RBAC

Role-Based Access Control that regulates access to Kubernetes resources based on roles assigned to users.

Kubernetes Admission Controller

A plugin that intercepts requests to the API server before object persistence, enforcing policies and mutations.

Kubernetes Custom Resource

An object that extends Kubernetes API with custom functionality beyond the built-in resource types.

Key Exchange

The process of securely sharing cryptographic keys between parties for encrypted communication.

Kubernetes Taint

A node attribute that repels pods unless they have a corresponding toleration, used for specialized scheduling.

Kubernetes Toleration

A pod attribute that allows scheduling on nodes with matching taints, overriding default scheduling constraints.

Kubernetes Label

Key-value pairs attached to objects like pods for identification and selection by other Kubernetes objects.

Kubernetes Selector

A mechanism to identify a set of objects based on label criteria, used by services and other controllers.

Kubernetes Annotation

Non-identifying metadata attached to objects, used to store arbitrary information for tools and libraries.