Glossary

Agent injector — A mutating webhook served by the traffic-manager. It rewrites a workload's pod template to add the traffic-agent sidecar when an attachment requires one. See Traffic Agent Sidecar.

Attachment — The coupling of your workstation to a container in a cluster workload, giving your locally running code the container's traffic, environment variables, and volumes. Created with one of the four mode commands — replace, intercept, wiretap, or ingest — and ended with telepresence detach. See Attachments. Releases before 2.30 called this an engagement.

Connection — The link between your workstation and a cluster established by telepresence connect. A connection makes the cluster's network reachable locally and is a prerequisite for attachments. Multiple named connections can be active at once.

Ingest — The attachment mode that makes a container's environment and volumes (read-only) available locally without touching any traffic.

Intercept — The attachment mode that reroutes requests destined for a service port to your workstation, optionally narrowed down with HTTP header and path filters, while the remote container keeps running.

Node-agent — A traffic-agent that runs as a node-hosted pod and attaches to an existing pod's Linux namespaces instead of being injected as a sidecar. It leaves the workload unmodified and its pods unrestarted, but runs privileged. See Node-hosted traffic-agent.

Replace — The attachment mode that removes the targeted container from the workload's pods and reroutes everything intended for it to your workstation. The container is restored when the attachment ends.

Root daemon — The Telepresence process that runs with elevated privileges on your workstation and manages the virtual network interface and DNS. Not needed when connecting with --docker.

Sidecar — The default way to run the traffic-agent: as an extra container that the agent injector adds to the workload's pods. Injection restarts the pods once; the node-agent is the alternative that avoids this.

Traffic-agent — The cluster-side component that serves attachments for one workload: it relays traffic, environment, and volumes between the pod and your workstation. Runs as a sidecar or as a node-agent.

Traffic-manager — Telepresence's central cluster-side component, installed once per cluster by an administrator (telepresence helm install). It coordinates clients and traffic-agents and serves the agent injector.

User daemon — The Telepresence process that runs with your user privileges on your workstation. It talks to the traffic-manager and manages the lifecycle of connections and attachments.

Virtual network interface (VIF) — The network device that the root daemon creates on connect. It routes the cluster's subnets so that every local tool can reach cluster services. See Connection Routing.

Wiretap — The attachment mode that sends a copy of a service port's traffic to your workstation while the cluster serves all requests as usual. Responses from your local service are discarded.