How Kubernetes Reports Node Status

The status of a Node in Kubernetes is critical in managing a Kubernetes cluster. Kubernetes provides details about the status of a Node. In particular, the conditions field of a Node's status provides information about the status of running Nodes. For example, the Ready condition provides information about the readiness and health of a Node.

The values for the Ready condition are as follows:

  • True: The Node is healthy and is ready to accept Pods.

  • False: The Node is not healthy and is not accepting Pods.

  • Unknown: The Node controller has not recently heard from the Node.

You can get the status of a Node by using the kubectl get nodes and kubectl describe node commands. For example:
kubectl get nodes
NAME      STATUS   ROLES                       AGE    VERSION
NodeA     Ready    control-plane,etcd,master   233d   v1.25.16+rke2r2
Kubernetes reports that NodeA is Ready.
kubectl describe node nodea
...
Conditions:
  Type                 Status  LastHeartbeatTime                 LastTransitionTime                Reason                       Message
  ----                 ------  -----------------                 ------------------                ------                       -------
  ...
  Ready                True    Thu, 16 Jan 2025 14:04:26 +0000   Thu, 09 Jan 2025 05:01:08 +0000   KubeletReady                 kubelet is posting ready status

Kubernetes reports that the Ready condition for NodeA is True and NodeA is accepting Pods.

For more information, see https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/node/node-status/ in the Kubernetes documentation.