Kubernetes Manifests Cheat Sheet

Now that we've covered Introduction to Kubernetes, you know the big pieces: clusters, nodes, pods, the control plane, services, deployments, and ingress.

This lesson is the next practical layer: how those ideas are written down.

A Kubernetes manifest is a YAML document that declares the state you want Kubernetes to maintain:

human intent -> YAML manifest -> Kubernetes API -> cluster state

Instead of manually starting containers one by one, you describe objects such as:

• Deployment: run and update application pods
• Service: give pods a stable network entry point
• Ingress: route external HTTP traffic
• ConfigMap / Secret: inject configuration

This is configuration as code, applied to orchestration.