23 Advanced kubectl commands

Collection of useful kubectl commands

Updated: Dec 21, 2020

I’ve personally used these commands to debug in production. I also used GUI methods like k9s and lenses.io.

0. Impersonate a user and group

kubectl get pods --as-group="somecompany:somecompany-teamname" --as="test"

1. Explain a resource

❯ kubectl explain hpa
KIND:     HorizontalPodAutoscaler
VERSION:  autoscaling/v1
DESCRIPTION:
     configuration of a horizontal pod autoscaler.
FIELDS:
   apiVersion   <string>
     APIVersion defines the versioned schema of this representation of an
     object. Servers should convert recognized schemas to the latest internal
     value, and may reject unrecognized values. More info:
     https://git.k8s.io/community/contributors/devel/sig-architecture/api-conventions.md#resources
kind <string>
     Kind is a string value representing the REST resource this object
     represents. Servers may infer this from the endpoint the client submits
     requests to. Cannot be updated. In CamelCase. More info:
     https://git.k8s.io/community/contributors/devel/sig-architecture/api-conventions.md#types-kinds
metadata     <Object>
     Standard object metadata. More info:
     https://git.k8s.io/community/contributors/devel/sig-architecture/api-conventions.md#metadata
spec <Object>
     behaviour of autoscaler. More info:
     https://git.k8s.io/community/contributors/devel/sig-architecture/api-conventions.md#spec-and-status.
status       <Object>
     current information about the autoscaler.
kubectl explain svc

2. Get nodes region and zone

❯ kubectl get nodes --label-columns failure-domain.beta.kubernetes.io/region,failure-domain.beta.kubernetes.io/zone
NAME                                        STATUS   ROLES    AGE     VERSION               REGION      ZONE
ip-11-0-109-70.eu-west-1.compute.internal   Ready    <none>   5d21h   v1.16.15-eks-ad4801   eu-west-1   eu-west-1b…