The data plane

The data plane is the collection of the nodes in the cluster that run your containerized workloads as pods. The data plane and control plane can share physical or virtual machines. This happens, of course, when you run a single node cluster, such as Minikube. But, typically, in a production-ready deployment, the data plane will have its own nodes. There are several components that Kubernetes installs on each node in order to communicate, watch, and schedule pods: kubelet, kube-proxy, and the container runtime (for example, the Docker daemon).