The Kubernetes Manifest Life Cycle Too Often Overlooked
Kubernetes has wholly changed the way applications are delivered and run. Today we build faster, ship code constantly and manage colossal workloads in ways we could never have imagined. But as more and more organizations adopt and embrace this new way of working, the deeply complex cloud native landscape is evolving so fast that it’s becoming hard to keep up.
Kubernetes is one of the key shifts that has helped increase the speed of deployment and reliability of the applications. However, little attention is paid to Kubernetes manifests.
These YAML files describe the resources — from services to deployments and pods, etc. — of the object you aim to create and how they should run in a cluster. Even here, things are not straightforward.
The growing cloud native ecosystem means more tools with more and bigger manifests to manage, alongside an explosion of code with differing syntaxes, which has become increasingly challenging for individual engineers to stay abreast of. That’s not to mention the inherent challenges of deployment across microservice architectures, where siloed teams may not be aware of up and downstream changes to services.
Today’s ecosystem for performing all the above tasks is split into two main parts — tools/integrated development environments (IDEs) for writing and editing manifests and cluster inspection tools for monitoring manifests running in clusters. On either side, the most popular and frequently used tools are Visual Studio Code for writing and Lens for monitoring.
