TL;DR – What are minions in Kubernetes?
In short, “minions” in Kubernetes are nothing but the worker nodes in a Kubernetes cluster. As we know, Kubernetes is a cluster of machines. Each machine in the cluster had a role. A node can be a Master node or a Worker node.
In the early days of Kubernetes, we called the worker nodes “minions.” Today, we refer to them as “nodes.”
Somewhere around 2014, the Kubernetes community started discussing replacing the term “minions.” This was because the term is heavily associated with the Salt project, where the daemon service that receives commands from the Salt master and executes them is called “Salt Minions.”
Several suggestions were made for replacing the term “minion.” Some suggestions were KNode (where k would be silent), Stevedore, KBox, etc.
Ultimately, the community chose “node” instead of “minion.” They changed the code to reflect this decision and replaced all references to “minion” with “node.”
Key points:
Terminology: While “minions” is an older term, “worker nodes” is the more current and commonly used term in Kubernetes documentation and discussions.
Role in the Cluster: Worker nodes in Kubernetes, formerly known as minions, are responsible for running application workloads and hosting the pods that contain your containerized applications.
Components: Each worker node runs the necessary services to support the hosted pods, including the container runtime, kubelet, and kube-proxy.
