Platform & DevOps·The orchestrator's model of the world
a machine joins the pool, advertises how much CPU and memory it has, and starts being given other people's workloads.
Node
Also calledworker node, cluster node, instance
One machine — usually a virtual one — that has joined a cluster and runs an agent taking work from the control plane. Almost everything about capacity, cost and failure domains resolves to nodes: how many, how big, in which zones, and how quickly a replacement appears. The reason node size is an argument is that big nodes bin-pack better and lose more when one dies.