What's new in kube-spawn
There’s been a number of changes in kube-spawn kube-spawn since we announced it.
The main focus of the recent developments was improving the CLI, supporting several clusters running in parallel, and enabling developers to test Kubernetes patches easily. In addition, we've added a bunch of documentation, improved error messages and, of course, fixed a lot of bugs.
CLI redesign
We’ve completely redesigned the CLI commands used to interact with kube-spawn. You can now use create to generate the cluster environment, and then start to boot and provision the cluster. The convenience up command does the two steps in one so you can quickly get a cluster with only one command.
Once a cluster is up and running you can use stop to stop it and keep it there to start it again later, or restart to stop and start the cluster.
The command destroy will take a cluster in the stopped or running state and remove it completely, including any disk space the cluster was using.
The following diagram provides a visualization of the CLI workflow.
Multi-cluster support
Previously, users could only run one cluster at the time. With the flag --cluster-name flag, running multiple clusters in parallel is now possible.
All the CLI operations can take --cluster-name to specify which cluster you’re referring to. To see your currently created clusters, a new command list was added to kube-spawn.
This is especially useful when you want to test how your app behaves in different Kubernetes versions or, as a Kubernetes developer, when you made a change to Kubernetes itself and want to compare a cluster without changes and another with your change side-by-side. Which leads us to the next feature.
Dev workflow support
kube-spawn makes testing changes to Kubernetes really easy. You just need to build your Hyperkube Docker image with a particular VERSION tag. Once that’s built, you need to start kube-spawn with the --dev flag, and set --hyperkube-tag to the same name you used when building the Hyperkube image.
Taking advantage of the aforementioned multi-cluster support, you can build current Kubernetes master, start a cluster with --cluster-name=master, build Kubernetes your patch, and start another cluster with --cluster-name=fix. You’ll now have two clusters to check how your patch behaves in comparison with an unpatched Kubernetes.
You can find a detailed step-by-step example of this in kube-spawn’s documentation.
kube-spawn, a certified Kubernetes distribution
We’ve successfully run the Kubernetes Software Conformance Certification tests based on Sonobuoy for Kubernetes v1.7 and v1.8. We’ve submitted the results to CNCF and they merged our PRs. This means kube-spawn is now a certified Kubernetes distribution.
Conclusion
With the above additions, we feel like kube-spawn is one of the best tools for developing on Linux with, and on, Kubernetes.
If you want to try it out, we've just released kube-spawn v0.2.1. We look forward to your feedback and welcome issues or PRs on the Github project.