$ k8scalc glossary --all
Glossary
Concise definitions for Kubernetes, storage, networking, observability, and AI infrastructure terms.
Kubernetes
etcd
A distributed key-value store used by Kubernetes to store all cluster state and configuration. etcd is the single source of truth for the entire cluster.
kubeadm
A tool for bootstrapping Kubernetes clusters. It automates the setup of control plane components and joining worker nodes, following Kubernetes best practices.
CNI (Container Network Interface)
A standard interface for Kubernetes networking plugins. CNI plugins (Flannel, Calico, Cilium) handle pod-to-pod networking, IP address management, and network policies.
cert-manager
A Kubernetes controller for automating TLS certificate management. cert-manager can issue certificates from Let's Encrypt, Vault, or internal CAs, and automatically renews them.
ArgoCD
A declarative GitOps continuous delivery tool for Kubernetes. ArgoCD syncs cluster state to match Git repository state, enabling automated, auditable deployments.
Helm
A package manager for Kubernetes. Helm charts bundle Kubernetes manifests into reusable packages with configurable values, versioned and published to chart repositories.
k3s
A lightweight Kubernetes distribution by Rancher. k3s packages the entire Kubernetes control plane into a single binary under 100MB, ideal for edge, IoT, and small VPS deployments.
Temporal
A durable workflow orchestration platform. Temporal persists workflow state in a database (PostgreSQL or Cassandra), enabling long-running, fault-tolerant business processes to survive process restarts.
Networking
Ingress Controller
A Kubernetes component that manages external HTTP/S access to cluster services. Common implementations include NGINX Ingress, Traefik, and HAProxy Ingress.
Linkerd
A lightweight service mesh for Kubernetes. Linkerd provides automatic mTLS between pods, observability dashboards, and traffic management without sidecar overhead.
mTLS (Mutual TLS)
A protocol where both client and server authenticate each other using TLS certificates. In Kubernetes, service meshes like Linkerd and Istio use mTLS for pod-to-pod encryption.
HAProxy
A high-performance TCP/HTTP load balancer and proxy. In Kubernetes setups, HAProxy is commonly used as a reverse proxy to terminate TLS and forward traffic to ingress controller NodePorts.
Keepalived
A Linux tool providing high-availability via VRRP (Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol). In Kubernetes bare-metal setups, Keepalived creates a Virtual IP shared between load balancer nodes for failover.
Storage
Longhorn
A cloud-native distributed block storage system for Kubernetes. Longhorn creates replicated volumes across nodes and supports incremental backups to S3-compatible storage.
CSI (Container Storage Interface)
A standard interface for exposing storage systems to Kubernetes. CSI drivers allow storage vendors (Longhorn, Ceph, etc.) to provide persistent volumes to pods.
PVC (PersistentVolumeClaim)
A request by a pod for storage. A PVC binds to a PersistentVolume provisioned by a storage class (e.g. Longhorn). The PVC lifecycle is independent of the pod lifecycle.
Observability
Prometheus
An open-source metrics and alerting system. Prometheus scrapes metrics from Kubernetes components and applications, stores them in a time-series database (TSDB), and evaluates alert rules.
Loki
A horizontally scalable log aggregation system by Grafana Labs. Unlike Elasticsearch, Loki only indexes metadata labels, storing log content as compressed chunks in object storage.
AI & GPU
VRAM (Video RAM)
Memory on a GPU used to store model weights, activations, and KV cache during LLM inference. VRAM is the primary constraint when running large language models locally.
Quantization
A technique to reduce model memory usage by representing weights in lower precision (INT8, INT4, GGUF-Q4). Quantization trades a small accuracy loss for significant VRAM reduction.