Kubernetes Cluster Insights for Platform Teams¶

Many customers of the Rafay Kubernetes Operations Platform are "Platform Teams". In many cases, the first priority for these platform teams is to "take over and standardize" existing Kubernetes clusters in active use by application teams.

However, one of the challenges they run into with the take over process is nobody in the team has complete clarity into what resources already exist on the cluster and for what purpose. Identifying an accurate list manually can be extremely error prone and time consuming for both the platform teams as well as the various application teams resulting in delays in adoption and standardization efforts.

Kubernetes Insights Tool¶

To address this challenge, we have developed a "Kubernetes Cluster Insights tool" that our customers utilize to "discover" all resources on target clusters in just minutes. The output of this tool provides platform and application teams with "insights" into all the resources on the cluster and helps them make decisions on which team needs to manage which resource.

As a general practice, typically, cluster wide resources are migrated into a "Cluster Blueprint" and their lifecycle is then standardized and managed by the platform team. For example, it is more practical for the platform team to manage the lifecycle of an Ingress Controller as part of a standardized cluster blueprint.

flowchart LR
    subgraph MANAGED
        subgraph Blueprint
            direction RL
            ADDON-1 
            ADDON-2
        end
        platform-team
        subgraph Applications
            direction RL
            APP-1
            APP-2
        end
        app-team
    end
    subgraph UNMANAGED
        subgraph Apps
            direction RL
            APP1
            APP2
            APP3
        end
    end
    Blueprint -- managed by--> platform-team
    Applications -- managed by--> app-team
    UNMANAGED -- Cluster Insights Tool --> MANAGED

The image above describes how the management of an unmanaged cluster is taken over by a platform team.

How the "Kubernetes Insights" Tool Works¶

The "Kubernetes Insights" tool uses a cluster's kubeconfig file to interrogate the cluster to generate output. The following sequence diagram describes what the tool does at a high level.

sequenceDiagram
  participant a as Platform Team
  participant b as Insights Tool
  participant c as Target Cluster
  a->>b: Execute Insights Tool
  b->>c: List of All Namespaces 
  activate c
  b->>c: Retrieve list of All CRDs
  b->>c: Retrieve list of All Namespace scoped resources
  b->>c: For every namespace scoped resource, retrieve details 
  b->>c: Retrieve list of All Cluster scoped resources
  b->>c: For each cluster scoped resource, retrieve details
  deactivate c
  b->>a: Package and Send Results

Try The Tool¶

The Kubernetes Insights tool is free for everyone. You can try out the "Kubernetes Cluster Insights Tool" with your cluster. Clone/fork the Git Repo below and follow the instructions. Please contact us if you have suggestions on enhancements to the tool.

Git Repo-Kubernetes Insights

Blog Ideas¶

Sincere thanks to those who spend time reading our product blogs and provide us with feedback and ideas. Please Contact the Rafay Product Team if you would like us to write about specific topics.