Overview

The Kubernetes cluster for wbstack.com is provided by Google Kubernetes Engine.

The Kubernetes cluster is managed using a mixture of kubectl compatible yaml files, and helmfile deployments.

All Kubernetes related deployment code can be found here (opens new window).

TIP

A desirable state to reach would be only using helmfile and terraform for deployments (no manual kubectl commands).

CLI Tooling

You need helm version 3+ https://github.com/helm/helm/releases (opens new window)

You need helmfile https://github.com/roboll/helmfile/releases (opens new window)

And you need some helm plugins:

• diff (opens new window) - helmfile needs this to diff resources
• git (opens new window) - We need this to fetch charts from git

helm plugin install https://github.com/databus23/helm-diff
helm plugin install https://github.com/aslafy-z/helm-git

Connecting kubectl

You can get the credentials for the cluster using gcloud.

gcloud container clusters get-credentials cluster-1
kubectl config set-cluster cluster-1
kubectl get pods --all-namespaces

Monitoring events

You can watch a stream of all events that happen within the cluster using the following:

kubectl get events --watch

Pod access

If you want to start a shell in a pod you can do so with:

kubectl exec -it <podname> -- /bin/sh

Draining a node

You can use kubectl drain to safely evict all of your pods from a node before you perform maintenance on the node

You can read more about node draining here (opens new window).

Specific steps are listed here (opens new window)