Let’s learn about Kops, a Kubernetes operations tool.

Kubernetes is one of the most popular DevOps tools because of its amazing container orchestration system and features. But although Kubernetes offers so many functionalities, setting up a Kubernetes cluster from scratch is painful. This is where Kops comes into the picture.

With Kops, it is a cakewalk to create a Kubernetes cluster on cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud, etc. It makes setting up a Kubernetes cluster hassle-free, and in this article, I will discuss this awesome tool.

What is Kops?

Kops, also known as Kubernetes operations, is an open-source, official Kubernetes project, which allows you to create, maintain, upgrade and destroy a highly available production-grade Kubernetes cluster. It provisions the cloud infrastructure also depending on the requirement. The developers of Kops describe it as kubectl for Kubernetes clusters.

Kops is mostly used in deploying AWS and GCE Kubernetes clusters. Kops officially supports only AWS, other cloud providers such as DigitalOcean, GCE, and OpenStack are in the beta stage.

If you have worked on kubectl before, you will feel comfortable working on Kops. Kops provides commands to create, get, update, delete clusters. In addition, Kops knows how to apply changes in the existing clusters as it uses declarative configuration. With Kops, you can also scale up and down a Kubernetes cluster.

Below are the features of Kops:

• Deploys Kubernetes masters with high availability
• Rolling cluster updates are supported
• Automates the provisioning of AWS and GCE Kubernetes clusters
• Manages cluster add-ons
• Autocompletion of command in the command line
• Generates CloudFormation and Terraform configurations
• Supports state-sync model for dry-runs and automatic idempotency
• Creates instance groups to support heterogeneous clusters

#devops #kubernetes #kops