kubectl apply vs kubectl create?

Question

What I understood by the documentation is that:

• kubectl create = Creates a new k8s resource in the cluster
• kubectl replace

Answer 1

Just to give a more straight forward answer, from my understanding:

apply - makes incremental changes to an existing object
create - creates a whole new object (previously non-existing / deleted)


Taking this from a DigitalOcean article which was linked by Kubernetes website:

We use apply instead of create here so that in the future we can incrementally apply changes to the Ingress Controller objects instead of completely overwriting them.