| OS | The Operating System running on each of the hosts that will be part of your Kubernetes cluster | Choosing the right OS will be the foundation for building a production-grade Kubernetes cluster | Talos Linux |
| Storage solution | The underlying storage capabilities which Kubernetes will leverage to provide persistence for stateful workloads | Choosing the right storage solution for your clusters needs is important as there is a lot of balance tradeoffs associated with it, e.g redundancy vs. complexity | Longhorn |
| Container Runtime (CRI) | The software that is responsible for running containers | You need a working container runtime on each node in your cluster, so that the kubelet can launch pods and their containers | |
| Network plugin (CNI) | Plugin used for cluster networking | A CNI plugin is required to implement the Kubernetes network model | Cilium |
| Virtualisation | An optional layer between your hardware and your Kubernetes tech stack | In some scenarioes it might be benefitial to abstract the underlying hardeware away, and have everything running in virtual machines | |