Setup your Shell for Kubernetes and get productive quickly

This site is the companion to the KubeCon 2022 NA talk:

Set Up Your Shell For Kubernetes Productivity And Be Efficient Quickly - Sebastien “Prune” Thomas, Wunderkind & Archy Ayrat Khayretdinov, Google

Follow this website to run the demos on your own laptop.

Also check the slide deck that was used during the presentation.

You can also watch the KubeCon Na 2022 talk on Youtube.

Setup

This tutorial is running some commands that creates local files that are needed throughout the demos. We recommend you open a shell and cd into this folder:

mkdir -p ~/demo/base
cd ~/demo/base

to get access to some larger yaml files, you can also clone the repo using git. This is not needed though.

git clone git@github.com:cloud-native-canada/k8s_setup_tools.git

# if you don't have a git account, you can clone anonymously with:
# git clone https://github.com/cloud-native-canada/k8s_setup_tools.git

cd k8s_setup_tools

Agenda

• I need kubectl

  Install of the kubectl command and basic usage

• Getting rid of Docker-For-Desktop

  Docker For Desktop is now a paid software for enterprise users. The price was bumped again on October 27th 2022 !

  Learn how to replace Docker For Desktop once and for all.

• Alternative Docker replacement

  Install the tooling to use docker (without docker).

• Local Kubernetes cluster for development

  You don't always have a real (remote) Kubernetes cluster, or you have one, but you can't play with it. Learn how to create a local Kubernetes cluster for local development, a cluster that you can re-create many times a day to test things.

  Later on a sample application including a failed deployment will be installed to give some meat to the demos

• Install a sample application

  Quickly use kubectl command to create some resources.

• I'm typing too much kubectl

  Type less by using some alias commands

• kubectl arguments are too long

  Enhance kubectl experience by setting up the shell Completion. Stop typing everything and use tab key !

• ZSH and Oh My ZSH! framework

  Oh My ZSH! is a sort of framework for your shell that pre-configure and extend your shell with a ton of features.

• I'm still typing too much kubectl

  Using the kubectl plugin for Oh My ZSH! to even shorten the typing

• How do I use all those kubectl shorthands ?

  Let's demo some of the kubectl command and their associated alias

• There's too many output from kubectl I can't read it

  Here again there's some tooling to help. Let's introduce kubecolor !

• I want to extend kubectl

  Kubectl is already a complex command, but what if I want to extend it ?

• Switching Cluster Context is a pain

  kubectl uses a notion of context to manage the many servers you can connect to. Switching from one to the other can quickly be a pain. We have some tools for that too !

• I want multiple context at the same time

  The current default context and namespace are global to your shells.

  While more dangerous, it is possible to change this behaviour so each shell target a different context or namespace

• I have too many context

  With great power comes great responsibility. Let's see how we can ensure we're sending command to the right cluster.

• I need to read my logs

  Remotely accessing pods logs is one of the most powerful feature, but be honnest, it's really hard to read. This is what we can do about it.

• I'm using a Cloud Kubernetes, How can I connect to it ?

  Using Cloud resources is the norm today. Let's see how to configure your laptop to use them.

• How can i observe what’s deployed in my cluster?

  We will quickly dive into an interfaces offering an overview of your cluster down to editing the resources.

• I just want to clic, no shell

  Full UI to K8s, no more shell, just clic.

• Working with YAML is so hard

  Finaly we will go through some of the helpers that you can install when you're developing for Kubernetes or extensively working with json and yaml files

• I need for tooling for my advanced usage

  Here you'll find some cool tools that can ease the pain of working with Kubernetes and Yaml.