Abhimanyu Chitra Selvan
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The Ultimate CLI to manage your Kubernetes Clusters

The Ultimate CLI to manage your Kubernetes Clusters

Who let the K9s out!

Abhimanyu Chitra Selvan's photo
Abhimanyu Chitra Selvan
·Oct 9, 2021·

2 min read

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There is something so aesthetically pleasing about a terminal window - Abhi

terminal.png

If you have been working in tech, a terminal, is not something new to you. A terminal and internet is all you need to build stuff. No, seriously, that's all you need. Having spent countless hours staring at this black box, you tend to realise what a magnificent tool it is.

Terminal UI tools are also popular amongst terminal nerds for same reasons as above. I even built one myself. In this post, I will demonstrate one such tool that I use everyday, the k9s. I would be surprised if it is not already part of the toolkit of folks working with k8s.


Canines(K9s) and Kubernetes(K8s)

kubectl command is basically your key into the K8s world. K9s is a portal(an interactive jacked up kubectl) to manage the kubernetes clusters.

To be honest, I was not aware of this tool until recently. Prior to this I was happily using kubermatic/fubectl as I was administrating a relatively simple application running on top of k8s. However, the scale and complexity of applications and infrastructure I deal with right now has increased manyfold. Simple cli tools became a no go.

Enter K9s = Terminal + Vim + K8s

Here is a terminal recording of k9s where I am exploring a simple demo microservices application running on kind local cluster.

k9s-walkthrough-min.gif

You can see how simple, intuitive, interactive and fast it is to navigate and manage your cluster without having to leave the terminal window. I have barely touched the surface of this powerful utility and there is a lot this tool has to offer. For more advanced features checkout the links below,


As mentioned in my previous post, I started approaching everything on a need basis and right now, k9s does it for me.

Perhaps, I might move to Lens in the future ;)

Are there are terminal k8s cli tools that I am missing out on?, share your recommendations in the comments.

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