Kubernetes cluster visualizer

GCP live k8s visualizer is a cool project to visualize your k8s cluster. As pods, services & other resources come in and go out, it shows a visual map of your cluster

gcp live k8s visualizer

The animation above is from this guide. Followed the instructions there in but ran into javascript null errors .

Anyway, took a look this morning and while it was a simple fix, I'm not sure why the kube api is returning null for something that's a collection?

Anyway, here's the fork with the fix applied which should let you run the visualizer against your cluster.

I also made it show the Deployment (since ReplicationControllers are apparently superseded by ReplicaSets). While the job of the ReplicaSet is the same as the earlier RC, the preferred method to scale is via the Deployment. The visualization's a little weird - but basically I have a Deployment showing up where earlier a ReplicationController would have been.

Minikube on Windows - teething troubles

The .minikube folder location

So I was recently getting Minikube on my work laptop. As it happens, this did not go painlessly. My C drive has a measly 100G (free 8G) so almost all tools I install, if their dot file folder is going to hold anything significant like virtualbox images, I usually symlink it off to my D drive which is a lot roomier.

DON'T DO THAT WITH MINIKUBE YET.... it does not work :(. I tried symlinking the .minikube folder when that didn't work, then the .minikube/machines folder - neither worked. If you're really desperate, you could use Virtualbox media manager to move the disk to some other drive. Of course, this isn't really a solution since you need to have enough space in C in the first place.

There's a ticket to have a MINIKUBE_HOME which will let you move the config folder around - so go subscribe to it if you need this. The second PITA is that the minikube.exe as well as the kubectl all have to be on C drive as well - but symlinks work for that.

SSH client

I also ran into trouble with ssh - minikube vm provisioning was using my external SSH client that it found on PATH and was calling that without quoting properly which resulted in the provisioning failing. Turning on verbose logging with --v 9 showed what was happening and the easiest way out was to make sure there's no ssh.exe on path - this forces minikube to use it's internal ssh client and provisioning proceeded.

Once you have Minikube up though, it's quite nice to work with.