Why pod is the smallest unit?

Question

In almost every article, it is mentioned that pod is the smallest unit of Kubernetes?

What does it mean? What is the meaning of smallest?

Answer 1

Smallest unit in that context means "smallest deployable thing".

Technically a container is an even smaller unit because a pod can contain multiple containers, but you can not deploy a single container, only a pod with one container. That's why the pod is considered the smallest unit in kubernetes.