In a typical theoretical system, I would call the different applications that make up the system nodes. However this is confusing in a Kubernetes cluster system for two reasons:
So the question is, what terminology is used to describe the subject that you would run on a pod? Are they projects? Processes? Application nodes? Applications?
None of the above sound right to me.
Pods contain one (or rarer more) application(s):
A Pod models an application-specific "logical host": it contains one or more application containers which are relatively tightly coupled.
In the Kubernetes universe, Nodes are the physical or virtual machines that your cluster is running on. Pods run on the Nodes. I suggest to avoid the term Node for applications.