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Tools to make working with Kubernetes easier
2020-02-14

In my last project I worked extensively with Kubernetes. Two tools which ease the management of your cluster and workloads are kubens/kubectx and k9s.

kubens/kubectx makes it very easy if you have more than one Kubernetes cluster or work with multiple namespaces. The tools allow easy switching between namespaces and contexts without having to edit your .kubeconfig all the time or append --namespace to your kubectl commands.

An even better tool is k9s. Its an interactive terminal UI for your Kubernetes cluster. By default it shows pods, but by typing e.g. :ingress it also can show more Kubernetes resources, in this example the ingresses you have. :secrets give you the secrets, :configmap the config maps and so on. :ns lets you switch between namespaces. It also lets you kill pods, edit stuff directly in the UI, ssh into pods and much more. Before I found that tool I remembered like 2000 kubectl commands - now I won’t touch a Kubernetes cluster without installing k9s. It’s such a great help. Be sure to check the built-in help by pressing ? and take the time to learn the features, it really pays of.


Tags: kubernetes

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