Kubectl and K9s

Description:

After downloading your context file for an Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) cluster, you have many ways of interacting with the cluster. I will show the two I’m most familiar with here.

To Resolve:

1. If you haven’t already, install kubectl and k9s on your machine locally

2. First we will cover k9s since it is a console program for interacting with clusters:

   • main commands:
   • ctrl+a / :alias => shows all reasources for a cluster
   • :q / Ctrl+c => quit
   • :ctx => shows context
   • :node => navigates to a resource like all nodes
   • d describe
   • v view
   • e edit
   • l logs
   • Reference all cli options here

3. From the k9s site:

   # List all available CLI options
   k9s help
   # Get info about K9s runtime (logs, configs, etc..)
   k9s info
   # Run K9s in a given namespace.
   k9s -n mycoolns
   # Run K9s and launch in pod view via the pod command.
   k9s -c pod
   # Start K9s in a non default KubeConfig context
   k9s --context coolCtx
   # Start K9s in readonly mode - with all modification commands disabled
   k9s --readonly
   

4. So that is a tool to get familiar with, but more important is to get familiar with kubectl

   • First, let’s look at context commands

   kubectl config view # Show Merged kubeconfig settings.
   kubectl config get-contexts                          # display list of contexts
   kubectl config current-context                       # display the current-context
   kubectl config use-context my-cluster-name           # set the default context to my-cluster-name
   

   • Get all deployments: kubectl get deployments --all-namespaces=true
   • Get all pods: kubectl get pods -A
   • Follow the link above and this link for a full list of commands. Only way to learn is to practice!

5. To Do: Use kubelogin for authentication without the --admin credentials. See this post for details.

6. List IAM roles at Resource level: az role assignment list --scope /subscriptions/<subscriptionID>/resourceGroups/<resourcegroupname>/providers/Microsoft.ContainerRegistry/registries/<acrname> -o table

7. Attach Azure Container Registry (ACR) to AKS: az aks update -n <myAKSCluster> -g <myResourceGroup> --attach-acr <acr-resource-id>

8. Service principle used for AKS: az aks show --resource-group <myResourceGroup> --name <myAKSCluster> --query servicePrincipalProfile.clientId -o tsv

9. If in a test environment, stop the cluster after testing to save resources: az aks stop --resource-group my-cluster-rg --name my-cluster

10. Full List of AKS commands for reference.