k9s VS kind

Looking for a terminal-based Kubernetes experience but one that's a bit more sophisticated than Kubectl? K9s is a complete terminal UI that lets you monitor, manage, and benchmark your Kubernetes workloads. It offers a versatile dashboard-like interface in your console.

k9s version v0.24.14 (just for fun)

Pierre: The first tool I recommend is K9s. It's not just a time-saver but a productivity booster. With its intuitive interface, you can speed up all the usual kubectl commands, access logs, edit resources and configurations, and more. It's like having a personal assistant for your cluster management tasks.

The last thing you really need is a common set of tools that you want fingertip access to. I really commonly use LazyGit and K9s in my day job so those are the tools I will show off in this article.

K9s is your best friend (get it? 🐶) when exploring your cluster via the terminal. It shares commonality with Vim for its interaction style using shortcuts and starting commands with: but don’t let that discourage you. K9s keeps a vigilant eye on Kubernetes activities, providing real-time information and intuitive commands for resource interaction.

k9s: brew install k9s

I would like to put in a vote for k9s, which is also on the list at Terminal Trove. [0] It's the most convenient tool I've ever found for Kubernetes management. Based on that experience I'll definitely be checking out Harlequin.

[0] https://k9scli.io/

$ wget https://github.com/derailed/k9s/releases/download/v0.29.1/k9s_Darwin_amd64.tar.gz $ tar -xzf k9s_Darwin_amd64.tar.gz $ sudo mv k9s /usr/local/bin/

All in all, run things, do some kubectl apply -f something.yml every day, install k9s, and try to configure a big one cluster at some point.

Kind is our third tool that can be used to start a Kubernetes cluster, but this one has a slightly different focus. It lets you run Kubernetes environments in Docker containers, with each container acting as a Node.

A running Kubernetes cluster (I used kind for my k8s local environment).

Have you tried https://kind.sigs.k8s.io/? If so, how does it compare to k3s for testing?

To get started, you'll need to install clusteradm and kubectl and start up three Kubernetes clusters. To simplify cluster administration, this article starts up three kind clusters with the following names and purposes:

Kind: is a tool for running local Kubernetes clusters using Docker container "nodes." It was primarily designed for testing Kubernetes itself but can also be used for local development or continuous integration.

Fortunately, just as projects like kind and Minikube enable developers to spin up a local Kubernetes environment in no time, CRC, also known as OpenShift Local and a recursive acronym for "CRC - Runs Containers", offers developers a local OpenShift environment by means of a pre-configured VM similar to how Minikube works under the hood.

I recently purchased a used Lenovo M900 Think Centre (i7 with 32GB RAM) from eBay to expand my mini-homelab, which was just a single Synology DS218+ plugged into my ISP's router (yuck!). Since I've been spending a big chunk of time at work playing around with Kubernetes, I figured that I'd put my skills to the test and run a k3s node on the new server. While I was familiar with k3s before starting this project, I'd never actually run it before, opting for tools like kind (and minikube before that) to run small test clusters for my local development work.

Features compared to https://kind.sigs.k8s.io/

Kind allows you to run a Kubernetes cluster inside Docker. This is incredibly useful for developing Helm charts, Operators, or even just testing out different k8s features in a safe way.

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