The cluster can be interacted with using the kubectl CLI. This is the main approach used for managing Kubernetes and the applications running on top of the cluster.

Details of the cluster and its health status can be discovered via kubectl cluster-info

To view the nodes in the cluster using kubectl get nodes

If the node is marked as NotReady then it is still starting the components.

This command shows all nodes that can be used to host our applications. Now we have only one node, and we can see that it’s status is ready (it is ready to accept applications for deployment).

With a running Kubernetes cluster, containers can now be deployed.

Using kubectl run, it allows containers to be deployed onto the cluster - kubectl create deployment first-deployment --image=katacoda/docker-http-server

The status of the deployment can be discovered via the running Pods - kubectl get pods

Once the container is running it can be exposed via different networking options, depending on requirements. One possible solution is NodePort, that provides a dynamic port to a container.

kubectl expose deployment first-deployment --port=80 --type=NodePort

The command below finds the allocated port and executes a HTTP request.

export PORT=$(kubectl get svc first-deployment -o go-template='{{range.spec.ports}}{{if .nodePort}}{{.nodePort}}{{"\n"}}{{end}}{{end}}') echo "Accessing host01:$PORT" curl host01:$PORT

The results is the container that processed the request.

Enable the dashboard using Minikube with the command minikube addons enable dashboard

Make the Kubernetes Dashboard available by deploying the following YAML definition. This should only be used on Katacoda.

kubectl apply -f /opt/kubernetes-dashboard.yaml

The Kubernetes dashboard allows you to view your applications in a UI. In this deployment, the dashboard has been made available on port 30000 but may take a while to start.

To see the progress of the Dashboard starting, watch the Pods within the kube-system namespace using kubectl get pods -n kube-system -w

Once running, the URL to the dashboard is https://[[HOST_SUBDOMAIN]]-30000-[[KATACODA_HOST]].environments.katacoda.com/