What is the purpose of a ReplicaSet in the VMware vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS)?

A ReplicaSet is a core Kubernetes workload controller used in VKS clusters to maintainavailability and steady-state capacityfor stateless applications. Its primary purpose is to ensure that adesired number of identical pod replicasare running continuously. If a pod is deleted, crashes, or is evicted because a node fails, the ReplicaSet detects that the current number of matching pods has dropped below the target and immediately creates replacement pods to restore the requested replica count. Conversely, if too many matching pods exist (for example, due to manual creation or a transient surge), it scales down by deleting excess pods to return to the desired state.

This behavior makes ReplicaSets foundational to reliable, self-healing application operation in Kubernetes and therefore in VKS. In practice, administrators and DevOps teams usually interact with ReplicaSets indirectly through higher-level controllers likeDeployments, which manage rolling updates and revisions while using ReplicaSets underneath to enforce the replica count for each version of an application. Options A, B, and D map to other Kubernetes objects (Service, StatefulSet, and DaemonSet respectively), not ReplicaSet.