Top Kubernetes Tools to manage containers

1. Kubernetes Monitor

Kubernetes Monitor is one of the first Kubernetes tools I look for when I'm looking for a tool for managing containers. Kubernetes Monitor was the first open source tool I tried for the purpose, but I was very disappointed as it didn't even support VMs.

The first beta release of Kubernetes Monitor was in February 2017, and according to the GitHub page, the product reached the stable version at the end of March 2017.

Kubernetes Monitor will support you in visualizing both your containers and the Kubernetes node orchestrators. It allows you to filter on the names of containers and also allows you to search for resource usage by name, container id, and resource group. Kubernetes Monitor also lets you generate useful data for future reference by exporting the customizations and logs. You can run these customizations as cronjobs and even use them for plugins to your applications.

Kubernetes Monitor comes with two different modes of work:

Host > Workloads > Startup Summary

Host > Workloads > Application Summary

These are the most important files to look for when evaluating Kubernetes Monitor.

2. Terraform

Terraform is an open source Kubernetes tool for managing and scaling your infrastructure. It was created by the creator of Packer (a powerful tool for deploying a wide range of packages). Terraform allows you to bring your Kubernetes infrastructure under your control and manage it without configuration files, automated configuration scripts, or even a single line of Ruby.

Terraform is much more than that, however. By importing one or more Kubernetes node definitions, you can easily create fully-managed resources. With Terraform, you can also attach the server in one specific place.

To install Terraform, run:

$ brew install terraform

You can also download the source code from here.

3. Pipemon

Pipemon is a solution for security auditing and monitoring written in Go language. It is compatible with Kubernetes and creates a Docker file that allows you to create custom information about containers.

The report is generated using standard system utilities. If you need to customize the report, you can modify the Dockerfile and modify the report. The image has a changelog and the container number. The container number is the unique identifier for each container, which may also be used in security alerts.

With Pipemon, you can audit your Kubernetes deployments and notify if something goes wrong. My company also used the solution in a project (not written in Go) to audit Docker containers.

4. NameNode

As a Kubernetes tool for managing your servers, NameNode will help you identify your servers' IP addresses and the ports that they are using. It will also help you determine their hostsname if a name is not properly configured.

You can install NameNode by using the following command:

$ curl -sS https://getnamenode.org/installer | sh

You can use the installation file of NameNode by extracting it:

$ tar zxvf namenode-1.0.2.tar.gz

Then copy the namenode-1.0.2.tar.gz in your /opt directory and add the path to the extracted name node-1.0.2 file:

$ mkdir /opt/namenode-1.0.2

$ cd /opt/namenode-1.0.2

$ cp namenode-1.0.2.tar.gz /opt/namenode-1.0.2/namenode

$ sudo cp /opt/namenode-1.0.2/namenode/local/src/local/share/

NameNode comes with a tool which can be used to host custom commands in its shell and utilize it for different purposes.

5. Inspect.sh

Inspect.sh is a powerful Kubernetes tool for debugging, meaning it allows you to explore Kubernetes in many ways. This tool is a set of tasks in its own shell. One of the features is that you can trace inside a kubelet process. This function is useful when you cannot perform a full inspection of Kubernetes infrastructure.

Inspect.sh can execute commands inside Kubernetes kubelet and then inspect them.

You can find a complete example on GitHub.

6. Flow

Flow is a Kubernetes tool for managing and tracing Kubernetes services. It allows you to create and configure large-scale flows that can work without any configuration.

Flow allows you to retrieve logs from Kubernetes servers. You can read the logs to understand what's happening inside the Kubernetes cluster.

To use Flow, create a Docker file called flow-controller-for-kubernetes.yml and then install it using the following command:

$ docker run -d --net=host \

-p 8080:8080 --rm \

-p 9100:9100 --name kubernetes \

-v /usr/lib/systemd/system/ \

kubernetes/kubernetes.service \

-v /usr/lib/systemd/system/

nodejs-sdk.sh.gz

This command set will run nodejs-sdk.sh.gz, which will create a Docker file inside your directory. The directory you need to create is the root folder of your Kubernetes cluster.

When you run flow-controller-for-kubernetes.yml in the cluster, the following command will be executed:

$ sudo flow-controller-for-kubernetes.yml

This command will open the YAML file and show you all the commands you can execute inside the Kubernetes system.

To verify if all the commands are executed properly, run the command:

$ sudo netcat -h 192.168.3.4

To view a list of all commands that are executed with the flow, run the following command:

$ sudo flow list

Then copy the YAML file you created above to /usr/lib/systemd/system/ and add the path to the YAML file in /etc/systemd/system.

7. gzip

gzip is a utility for decompressing large files and detecting errors. It comes with a set of command-line tools and an interactive web interface.

You can use gzip to decompress large files. Gzip can be executed through any container that is using the systemd.

For example, to run gzip on your Kubernetes cluster, you need to install a server and then install Gzip, as follows:

$ sudo apt-get install gzip $ sudo mkdir -p /var/lib/systemd/system/ $ sudo apt-get install gzip $ sudo gzip -v /etc/systemd/system/

The following message will be displayed:

Release Version: 3.14.0-40+deb8u6 OpenSUSE 12.2 Status: enabled Priority: 3

Gzip has various options that can be configured, such as whether to compress from disk or the network. To save a file to disk, use:

$ gzip /tmp/filename.gz

To save a file to disk on your Kubernetes cluster, use:

$ gzip /var/lib/systemd/system/whatever.gz

To decompress a gzip-compressed file, use:

$ gzip /var/lib/systemd/system/whatever.gz | grep: | cut -d " " -f 1 | \

/usr/lib/systemd/system/whatever.gz

To decompress a gzip-compressed file to a file on disk, use:

$ gzip /var/lib/systemd/system/whatever.gz | \

gzip /dev/stdin

To ignore errors, use the -z flag.

$ gzip -z /var/lib/systemd/system/whatever.gz

To get a list of the errors Gzip was able to detect, use the -f flag.

$ gzip -f /var/lib/systemd/system/whatever.gz

To check whether any error has been detected, use the -v flag.

$ gzip -v /var/lib/systemd/system/whatever.gz

8. gvfs

gvfs is a storage backend that lets you use any storage medium (disk, network, or volume) as a persistent disk for your Kubernetes cluster.

gvfs works with the concept of volumes that you can create and destroy easily. gvfs provides a type of mount to enable you to use any file system on disk as a persistent storage system.

It can be installed with the following commands:

$ sudo apt-get install gvfs $ sudo gvfs init --verbose

This will create a file called /etc/vfio/gvfs.d/service to store configuration. You can then access this file with the command:

$ sudo gvfs list

This command will display all the volumes that are mounted to the system.

You can then list all the available volumes with the command:

$ gvfs list --depth 2

If you want to read the files from a specific volume, you can also use the command:

$ gvfs list --journal file

You can find more information about gvfs at the GVFS GitHub.

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Conclusion

Kubernetes is an increasingly popular platform, and many other service providers and tools offer end users a better way to create and manage their clusters.

Going into the Kubernetes world for the first time can be overwhelming, especially if you don't have any experience with Kubernetes. It's worth looking at some of these Kubernetes tools to understand more about Kubernetes.

Simplilearn’s Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) Certification Training Course provides you with training in a range of Kubernetes tools as part of becoming a Certified Kubernetes Administrator. We also offer this course as part of our Post Graduate Program in DevOps in collaboration with Caltech CTME.  This program also covers Docker, Chef, Puppet, Ansible, and a comprehensive range of DevOps tools and technologies.