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Kubernetes Cluster Insights for Platform Teams

Published February 7, 2023

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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 takeover 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. Special thanks to Hardik Italia for educating me on this tool that he built and assisting with this blog.

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. The 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. The image below 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.

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 in the readme
  • Please contact us if you have suggestions on enhancements to the tool.

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