Friday, March 22, 2019

Tips and Tricks for using K8S faster and easier

In this blog I will list down the Tips and Tricks around usage of K8S making it easier and faster to use. Some of these are extremely useful during the Certifications also. Usually I add them to my .bashrc file.

I will try to continuously update this blog as I get across many more. Also, if you come across any additional tips, let me know in the comments and I will add them here.

1) Create a shortcut for kubectl, this will save a few key strokes.
alias k='kubectl'
2) Adding this to .bashrc makes the auto completion work with the alias 'k' mentioned above. This makes it faster to complete the commands.
source <(kubectl completion bash | sed s/kubectl/k/g)
3) This deletes the namespace and creates it again. This makes sure that all the objects in the namespace are cleanup. This makes K8S faster as things the objects don't get piled over time.
alias kc='k delete namespaces my-namespace;k create namespace my-namespace' 
Once this is done, the default namespace has to be changed. Note to change the current context (kubernetes-admin@kubernetes) in the second command based on the output of the first command.
kubectl config current-context
kubectl config set-context kubernetes-admin@kubernetes --namespace=my-namespace
4) The watch command is used a lot in K8S to observe the the different objects getting created and destroyed (object life cycle). When we run 'watch k get pods' the 'k' alias doesn't get expanded unless the below is included in the .bashrc.
alias watch='watch '
5) A bunch of them are mentioned here at

-- 'Pimp my Kubernetes Shell'.
-- Boosting your kubectl productivity

6) YAML is better than XML in verbosity. But, typing YAML is still a pain. The below commands will create the sample YAML files that can be modified later on as per our requirement. Note that the actual K8S objects are not created, just the YAML files as the --dry-run option is used.
k run nginx --image=nginx --restart=Never --dry-run -o yaml > pod.yaml
k run nginx --image=nginx -r=2 --generator=run/v1 --dry-run -o yaml > rc.yaml
k run nginx --image=nginx -r=2 --dry-run -o yaml > deployment.yaml
k expose deployment nginx --target-port=80 --port=8080 --type=NodePort --dry-run -o yaml > service.yaml
That's it for now. Have fun with K8S.

7) With tmux multiple terminal sessions can be accessed simultaneously in a single window. Usually I split into multiple sessions based on the task at hand. Tmux is a bit tricky to get started with, but very easy to get addicted.

Here the window has been split into two sessions. On the right is the help with the examples and on the left is the prompt to try out the commands. No need to toggle across different screens.


Here on the top-right is the 'watch k get pods' and bottom-right is the 'watch k get deployments' command. And on the left is the prompt to try out the commands. In this case, we can notice the pods and deployments getting created and destroyed. The life cycle of the K8S objects.


Add the below to .bashrc to get the tmux start automatically in the terminal.
#Start tmux autmatically
if command -v tmux>/dev/null; then
  [[ ! $TERM =~ screen ]] && [ -z $TMUX ] && exec tmux
fi

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