Kubernetes has outperformed its competitors in container orchestration, even Docker Swarm and Amazon Web Services have acknowledged its brilliance. As a modern container-driven platform for deploying, monitoring, and delivering software applications, Kubernetes is certainly the most advanced. The Kubernetes container platform provides various great tools to help you develop containerized applications. Being an open-source platform, it can easily allow people to use different tools for different purposes. In this post, we will take a look at 15 tools that you can use to enhance K8s so that you can manage and operate your applications even more efficiently.
Top 15 Kubernetes Tools
1. Kubespray
Kubernetes Kubespray is a deployment tool that has a group of Ansible roles to work for. Kubespray can use Google Cloud Environment, Azure, AWS, OpenStack, Bare Metal infrastructure, etc to manage your deployment project. If you have knowledge regarding the Ansible roles, then you can easily work with this tool. It can make managing and provision deployments easy and also allow constant integration tests for verifying the management process.
2. Helm
Helm is a new management tool for Kubernetes orchestrations and it works with Charts or some YAML files to define, install, or make an upgrade on the Kubernetes. Helm can cope with complex Kubernetes environments because its Charts are easy to create and monitor. You can even share the Charts with others and use them to publish them on Kubernetes. Each chart contains the descriptions of the packages, as well as one template with manifest files that you can deploy at different times in different scenarios. Helm works like Homebrew or Yum RPM, or Apt and you can install it for Windows, Mac, and Ubuntu.
3. Apollo
Apollo is a user interface that allows you to manage Kubernetes services such as viewing logs, reverting a deployment, and more. Apollo is a lightweight tool that also offers flexible permissions to manage deployments continuously and you can integrate it with any in-built process. Apollo allows Kubernetes users to manage multiple clusters with different namespaces and you can view the current status of deployments from the live querying option. You can view the status of the pods, logs, and restart the pods whenever required.
4. Aqua Security
Aqua Security is a security tool for Kubernetes. It scans container images before you deploy them on Kubernetes, and makes the images accessible only for reading. As a result, it can detect threats and detect anomalies instantly if they are present on an image. Using Kubernetes, image scans can be performed on every containerized application to detect performance issues and scalability issues. Additionally, it can secure multi tenant environments by isolating processes between tenants for access to data. It can scan multiple security issues, malware, and other malicious threats.
5. Twistlock
With Twistlock, you can secure the entire life-cycle of a container and that too frequently and on a continuous basis. With its VMS, you can examine any part of the container for possible threats, the parts that you perceive to be particularly vulnerable. Furthermore, you can obtain end-to-end security for your Kubernetes containers through an automatic firewall. Scanning images before deployment is another crucial security feature of Twistlock that is compatible with Docker images and Node.js components as well. The focus of Twistlock is to continuously scan container images so that it can detect threats in real-time.
6. Kubernetes Dashboard
Kubernetes Dashboard is a Kubernetes monitoring tool that you can access from your web to manage small clusters. It has a user interface where you can perform discovery, load balancing, monitoring of applications, and more. And there are various performance-related troubleshooting methods available such as monitoring CPU usage, workloads, etc. Installing Kubernetes Dashboard only takes a YAML file that is ready-made and can also support iOS and Android devices.
7. Kubelet
Kubelets are node agents that developers can run on Kubernetes cluster nodes and register the nodes with an API server. Kubelet can monitor these nodes using PodSpecs, which is also a tool used to describe the pods. And Kubelet can access PodSpecs from the API central server and other related sources.
8. Kubectl
Kubectl is one of the CLI tools that come by default on Kubernetes and are suitable for all types of applications and Kubernetes operations. In the $HOME directory, you will be able to detect the config files where the nodes are but the tool is also compatible with other kubeconfig files. You can even set up the relevant environment variable using kubeconfig flag and use Docker to communicate with any API central servers. The commands that are used in Kubectl, are somewhat like Docker commands.
9. Kube-shell
You can use Kube-shell as an alternative to kubectl and it is also a great CLI tool for Kubernetes. Kube-shell is built on top of the kubectl to provide auto-completion of commands and the commands will be suggested to you based on the value you put. Once you run the commands, you will be able to view an in-line description for the commands. You can use arrow keys in the shell to cycle back to the previous functions of the commands.
11. Kubeless
It is an in-built Kubernetes tool and can be used to deploy small applications to Kubernetes. By using Kubeless, a serverless tool for Kubernetes, you can enable various tasks on the platform. This includes automating auto-scaling of applications, monitoring, troubleshooting, routing API calls, etc. Kubernetes Resources can be customized by creating custom Kubernetes Resource Definitions, which can be used to monitor the cluster.
12. Amazon EKS
EKS refers to the Amazon Elastic Container Service that allows the simple deployment, management, and scaling of containerized apps on Kubernetes. With EKS, you can manage your Kubernetes environment through various AWS availability zones. It automatically detects and replaces improper control panel nodes and provides on-time upgrades and patchings.
13. Prometheus
Kubernetes monitoring tool Prometheus allows monitoring of multi-dimensional data models. Apart from that, it has user-friendly protocols and a simple, self-explanatory format that is readable by humans and can be published with the typical HTTP transport.
14. Kubesec.io
Kubesec.io provides various Kubernetes resources for enhancing the security of Kubernetes containers. You can control your Kubernetes applications however you want, as it will verify the resources based on your Kubernetes best security measures. Kubesec.io contains a lot of links related to containers and Kubernetes security.
15. Virtual-Kubelet
This open-source implementation of Kubelet functions as a Kubelet in Kubernetes to connect with all API servers. Kubernetes primitives can be directly used along with services such as AWS, ACI, Hyper.sh, and others to facilitate creating a smooth Kubernetes environment.
Conclusion
Here we have listed out the monitoring tools for Kubernetes that include Kubernetes Dashboard, Kublet, etc.
Security tools include Twistlock, Aqua Security, etc.
Kubernetes deployment tools include Helm, Apollo, and more.
And Kubernetes CLI tools include Kubectl and more.
You may already be familiar with some of them if you have some familiarity with Kubernetes and its related tools. If not, you are introduced to them in this post. Each of these tools is important for managing different aspects of Kubernetes, and all of them have alternatives. We have covered a lot of detail about each of these tools in other guides, so you can check those out as well. If you want to suggest something, you can leave a comment below.