• It’s a process running on the worker nodes that registers the worker nodes to the cluster.
• When the scheduler schedules a pod on a given node (populates its NodeName property), the kubelet service running on that node requests the the container runtime engine (eg. Docker) to pull the image and run the container.
• It periodically monitors the status of the node and the pods on them and reports them to the kube-api server.
• It can independently manage pods on the node without relying on other K8s components. Kubelet can be configured to look for K8s manifest files in a directory. It can then automatically create, update and manage pods on the node based on the manifests files present in the directory. These pods are called Static Pods.
• The kubelet service must be run manually on the worker nodes. It is not setup automatically when we use KubeAdmin to setup the cluster.