The smallest deployable unit in Kubernetes - one or more containers that share a network namespace and storage, always co-scheduled on the same node.

Containers in a Pod communicate via localhost and share mounted volumes. A sidecar container (e.g., log shipper, service mesh proxy) runs alongside the main container in the same Pod. Pods are ephemeral - they do not reschedule themselves if they die. That is the job of higher-level controllers like Deployments, StatefulSets, and DaemonSets. Directly creating Pods in production (without a controller) is an anti-pattern.