K9s is K8s on Steroids

“Simplicity is key”

K9s Logo

Kubernetes unleashes a million possibilities for building, scaling and managing containerized applications. Several developers work with Kubernetes to deploy, maintain and monitor applications using K8s. However, as a newbie to K8s, I’d highly suggest switching over to K9s. After dealing with the headache of making aliases, trying to memorize K8s arguments and remembering names of everything; using K9s saves a lot of time.

Benefits of K9s

I’ll argue a UI beats a CLI any day of the week. Sure the command line junkies might die before looking at any usable interface, but for most of us, simplicity is key. K9s provides a clean interface handling contexts, namespaces, roles, deployments, logs, pods and everything in between. Ability to jump from a container in question to viewing logs is a simple press on the enter key.

Viewing logs of a container

Think about a production scenario, where you get paged about lag with a unfamiliar application. After setting up cloud credentials and point yourself to the correct cluster/environment, all you have to do is type in the following command:

k9s --namespace <YOUR_NAMESPACE>

If you don’t have exact namespace info or nothing pops up, just run:

k9s

Hit slash key and search for it. Now you can hit enter on the namespace and start searching through container logs by using a couple of other key binds labelled at the top.

In K8s this process would require, running several commands to get namespace info, container names and finally looking at the logs, instead you can just keep hitting enter and other key binds to get the same exact result.

I’m not affiliated at all with K9s, I just hate seeing people struggle to run K8s commands over and over again when K9s could saves hundreds of keystrokes by easily navigating to what needs to be looked at.

Great view of dependencies