Which of the following is a component of the Kubernetes Control Plane?

• A. kube-scheduler
• B. cloud-controller-manager
• C. kubelet
• D. kube-proxy

Answer: (B)

The control plane coordinates the whole cluster and includes components that run APIs, manage state, and make global decisions. The cloud-controller-manager is the part of the control plane that talks directly to the cloud provider’s API to manage cloud-specific resources, such as load balancers, external IPs, and certain node lifecycle tasks. It’s designed to run separately from the core controllers so cloud-specific logic can be decoupled and swapped as needed, which is why it’s considered a control-plane component.

The other options operate on the nodes rather than in the control plane: the kubelet is the agent that runs on each worker node to start and supervise containers, and kube-proxy runs on each node to implement Kubernetes services networking. Kube-scheduler is indeed a control-plane component that schedules pods, but the question highlights the cloud-provider integration role, which is fulfilled by the cloud-controller-manager.