What is kubelet?

The kubelet is a small agent. It runs on every worker node in a Kubernetes cluster. Think of it as the local manager for that one machine.

Its main job is to talk to the control plane. The control plane tells the kubelet which containers it needs to run on the node. The kubelet then makes sure those containers are running and are healthy. It works with a container runtime, like containerd, to actually start or stop the containers.

It also reports the status of the node back to the main cluster. I reckon you can think of it like a foreman on a worksite, mate. It just follows orders and gets the job done.