Introduction

In Chapter 1, Introduction to Kubernetes and Containers, we saw that Kubernetes is a portable and highly extensible open-source container orchestration tool. It provides very powerful capabilities that can be used to manage containerized workloads at scale. In the previous chapter, you got the big picture of how the different components of Kubernetes work together to achieve the desired goals. We also demonstrated some basic usage of kubectl in Chapter 2, An Overview of Kubernetes. In this chapter, we will take a closer look at this utility and look at how we can make use of its potential.

To reiterate, kubectl is a command-line utility for interacting with Kubernetes clusters and performing various operations. There are two ways to use kubectl while managing your cluster - imperative management, which focuses on commands rather than the YAML manifests to achieve the desired state, and declarative management, which focuses on creating and updating YAML manifest files...