Network Defense Essentials (NDE) Practice Exam 2026 - Free Network Defense Practice Questions and Study Guide

The correct answer is etcd, which acts as a distributed key-value store used by Kubernetes to store all its configuration data and state information. This component is essential for maintaining the overall state of the cluster, including pod configurations, service discovery, and even cluster metadata. Since etcd is designed to be consistent and highly available, it serves as a reliable backing store that allows Kubernetes to manage the life cycle of applications within the cluster effectively.

Each piece of data stored in etcd is essential for the Kubernetes control plane, enabling robust API interactions. For instance, when a user wants to deploy an application, the Kubernetes API server interacts with etcd to fetch and update configurations reflecting the current state of the resources. This ensures that all parts of the Kubernetes system can retrieve and update data consistently, which is critical for orchestration and management tasks.

The other components, like the Docker Daemon, Kubelet, and Ingress Controller, play different roles within the Kubernetes architecture and do not serve as backing stores. The Docker Daemon is responsible for managing Docker containers, Kubelet facilitates communication between the Kubernetes master and nodes, and the Ingress Controller manages external access to the services in the cluster but none of these provides the persistent storage and management of the