Which part of a Kubernetes cluster is responsible for running container workloads?

Worker nodes host the pods, which are the smallest deployable units containing containers, and manage their lifecycle through the kubelet agent. They provide the compute, memory, and storage resources for the application workloads.

Kube-proxy maintains network rules on nodes, enabling network communication to your Pods from inside or outside the cluster, not running workloads.

The control plane manages and orchestrates the worker nodes and pods, but does not directly run the application container workloads itself.

etcd is a distributed key-value store used by Kubernetes to store all cluster data, not for running container workloads.