ITGSS Certified DevOps Engineer Practice Test 2025 - Free DevOps Practice Questions and Exam Preparation Guide

The component that provides a consistent and highly-available key-value store in Kubernetes is etcd. This is a distributed key-value store that is used to hold and manage critical information such as configuration data and the state of the cluster. It plays a fundamental role in Kubernetes by maintaining the desired state of the system, which allows for coordination and consistency across the entire cluster.

Etcd is designed to be resilient and to support strong consistency guarantees, which are vital for the functioning of the Kubernetes control plane. It serves as the backbone for storing all of the cluster's data, including information about nodes, pods, services, and other Kubernetes resources. Because etcd replicates its data across multiple nodes, it ensures that Kubernetes can continue to function even in the event of node failures, providing high availability.

The other components listed, while essential for the overall Kubernetes architecture, serve different roles. For instance, the kube-scheduler is responsible for scheduling pods onto nodes, and the kube-controller-manager oversees the various controllers that manage the state of the cluster. The cloud-controller-manager interacts with cloud providers for tasks like managing cloud-specific resources. None of these components provide the key-value storage that etcd does, making it the correct answer for this question.