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Extensions

CLI​

Krew​

To discover, install, and manage plugins for kubectl.

brew install krew

# discover
kubectl krew search

# e.g.
kubectl krew install ctx       # for switching contexts
kubectl krew install ns        # for switching namespaces
kubectl krew install view-secret  # decodes secrets automatically

# to use
kubectl ctx        # shows available contexts
kubectl ns dev     # switches to the "dev" namespace
kubectl view-secret my-secret

Event Driven​

KEDA​

tip

Great with spot instances 👌

https://keda.sh - Kubernetes Event Driven Autoscaler.

  • Scales pods based on event metrics rather than just CPU/memory usage
  • Proactive scaling before resource constraints occur
  • Valuable with IO/blocking workload where HPA needs time
  • Integrates with various event sources (Kafka, RabbitMQ, Prometheus, etc.)
  • Scale to zero when no events
  • Works together with HPA
  • Ideal for serverless-like workloads on Kubernetes
  • Cost effective

Knative​

tip

Great with spot instances 👌

https://knative.dev

Serverless platform built on Kubernetes.

Provision & Scale​

Crossplane / Upbound​

https://crossplane.io | https://upbound.io

K8s as Terraform to manage infra, not just provision but also real-time. It can also manage services like PagerDuty, Github repos etc.

Karpenter​

https://karpenter.sh

  • More conservative and cost-aware version of Cluster Autoscaler.
  • Works node-level, unlike HPA which works pod-level.
  • No auto scaling group needed.

Helm​

Package manager for Kubernetes applications.

  • Simplifies deployment and management of applications
  • Provides templating for Kubernetes manifests
  • Enables version control and sharing of application configurations

Istio/Linkerd​

Service mesh solutions for traffic management, security, and observability.

Prometheus​

https://prometheus.io

Monitoring and observability stack for Kubernetes.

Cluster Admin​

Cert-Manager​

Certificate management for Kubernetes.

CI/CD​

Argo CD​

https://argo-cd.readthedocs.io

GitOps continuous delivery tool for Kubernetes. Provides visualization of application state and health

Flux​

GitOps operator for continuous delivery.

Tekton​

CI/CD pipeline framework for Kubernetes.