What is the difference between a Pod and a Deployment in Kubernetes?

A Pod is the smallest deployable unit in Kubernetes — it wraps one or more containers that share the same network and storage. However, Pods on their own are ephemeral.

A Deployment is a higher-level abstraction that manages Pods. It ensures a specified number of Pod replicas are running at all times, handles rolling updates, and allows rollbacks. You almost never create bare Pods in production; you use Deployments instead.

kubectl create deployment nginx --image=nginx:1.25 --replicas=3