Virtual kubelet

Virtual kubelet is currently in preview and is managed by the CNCF organization. It is quite an innovative approach that AKS uses for scalability purposes. Virtual kubelet is deployed on the Kubernetes cluster as a Pod. The container running within the Pod uses the Kubernetes SDK to create a new node resource and represents itself to the entire cluster as a node. The cluster components, including the API server, scheduler, and controllers, think of it and treat it as a node and schedule Pods on it.

However, when a Pod is scheduled on this node that is masquerading as a node, it communicates to its backend components, known as providers, to create, delete, and update the Pods. One of the main providers on Azure is Azure Container Instances. Azure Batch can also be used as a provider. This means the containers are actually created on Container Instances or Azure Batch rather than on the cluster itself; however, they are managed by the cluster. The architecture of virtual...