What is the difference between a Pod and a Deployment?

A Pod is the smallest deployable unit — one or more containers sharing a network and storage — but it has no self-healing. A Deployment manages a ReplicaSet of identical Pods, recreating them if they die and handling rolling updates and rollbacks. You almost always create Deployments, not bare Pods, for application workloads.

When should I use a StatefulSet instead of a Deployment?

Use a StatefulSet for workloads that need stable network identities, ordered startup and shutdown, and persistent per-replica storage — databases, message brokers, clustered stores. Deployments treat Pods as interchangeable, which is fine for stateless services but wrong for anything that keeps local state.

What does namespaced versus cluster-scoped mean?

Namespaced resources live inside a namespace and can be isolated and quota-limited per team or environment — Pods, Services, ConfigMaps. Cluster-scoped resources exist once for the whole cluster — Nodes, PersistentVolumes, Namespaces and CustomResourceDefinitions. The scope affects RBAC and how you reference the object.

What goes in apiVersion and kind?

Every manifest declares apiVersion (the API group and version, like apps/v1) and kind (the resource type, like Deployment). Together they tell the API server how to validate and store the object. Core resources like Pod and Service use just v1; grouped resources prefix the group, like batch/v1 for Job.

How do I see every resource type my cluster supports?

Run kubectl api-resources. It lists every kind, its short name, apiVersion and whether it is namespaced, including any CustomResourceDefinitions installed by operators. This is the authoritative list for your specific cluster and version, which may differ from this general reference.

Kubernetes Resource Type Reference

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Know your Kubernetes object kinds

Kubernetes models everything as API objects, each identified by a kind and an apiVersion. This reference lists the core resource kinds — the workload controllers, networking, configuration, storage and RBAC objects you use every day — with their apiVersion, whether they are namespaced or cluster-scoped, and what each is for.

How it works

A manifest declares the object’s type and desired state; the control plane works to make reality match. The most important distinction is the controller you pick for a workload:

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: web
spec:
  replicas: 3
  selector:
    matchLabels: { app: web }
  template:
    metadata:
      labels: { app: web }
    spec:
      containers:
        - name: web
          image: nginx:1.27

A Deployment manages stateless replicas; a StatefulSet handles stateful ones with stable identity; a DaemonSet runs one Pod per node; Jobs and CronJobs handle batch and scheduled work.

Tips and notes

Create Deployments rather than bare Pods so the control plane reschedules failed Pods automatically.
Keep configuration in ConfigMaps and sensitive values in Secrets, then mount them as env vars or files.
Remember Secrets are only base64-encoded by default — enable encryption at rest and tight RBAC to protect them.
Run kubectl api-resources to see the exact kinds, short names and scopes your cluster supports, including CRDs from installed operators.