Inspect stateless workloads

This document explains how to inspect existing stateless workloads running in a Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) air-gapped Kubernetes cluster. Stateless workloads let you run your application deployment without having to store data or application state. You can view your stateless workloads with the GDC console or the kubectl CLI to monitor resource usage and workload health.

This document is for developers within the application operator group, who are responsible for managing application workloads for their organization. For more information, see Audiences for GDC air-gapped documentation.

Before you begin

To complete the tasks in this document, you must request the necessary permissions and prepare your environment.

Request IAM roles

You must have specific roles to get the permissions you need to view and inspect stateless workloads. The roles you require depend on whether you are working within an organization-scoped shared cluster or project-scoped standard cluster. For more information, see Kubernetes cluster configurations.

Shared cluster roles

Ask your Project IAM Admin to grant you the following roles in your project namespace based on the task to perform:

  • Workload Viewer (workload-viewer): view all workloads deployed to a shared cluster.
  • Namespace Admin (namespace-admin): create, delete, edit, or view workloads in a shared cluster project namespace.

These roles are bound to your project namespace.

Standard cluster roles

To create, delete, edit, or view workloads in a standard cluster, ask your Project IAM Admin to grant you the Cluster Developer (cluster-developer) role. This role is bound to your project namespace.

Prepare your environment

To run commands against a Kubernetes cluster using the API, make sure you have the following resources:

  • Locate the Kubernetes cluster name, or ask a member of the platform administrator group what the cluster name is.

  • Sign in and generate the kubeconfig file for the Kubernetes cluster.

  • Use the kubeconfig path of the Kubernetes cluster to replace KUBERNETES_CLUSTER_KUBECONFIG in these instructions.

View a project's container workloads

To view your project's container workloads, complete the following:

Console

  • In the navigation menu, select Kubernetes Engine > Workloads.

    You can view details for your container workloads, such as the following:

    • Name
    • Type
    • Number of pods
    • Kubernetes cluster
    • Last modified date

    The container workloads are organized by which Kubernetes cluster they belong to. Select the Cluster drop-down to switch the cluster context.

CLI

  • Run the following command to list all pods in your project:

    kubectl get pods -n PROJECT_NAMESPACE

    The output is similar to the following:

    NAME                        READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
nginx-workload-ah-aa-1228   1/1     Running   0          12h
nginx-workload-ah-ab-6784   1/1     Running   0          11h
nginx-workload-ah-ac-0045   1/1     Running   0          12h

Inspect the deployment

To request more detailed information about the components of a Deployment resource, run commands that directly target the entity you're looking to inspect.

Get Deployment object information

To get detailed information about the Deployment object, run:

kubectl --kubeconfig KUBERNETES_CLUSTER_KUBECONFIG -n NAMESPACE \
    describe deployment DEPLOYMENT_NAME

Replace the following:

  • KUBERNETES_CLUSTER_KUBECONFIG: the kubeconfig file for the cluster running the deployment.

  • NAMESPACE: the namespace. For shared clusters, this must be a project namespace. For standard clusters, it can be any namespace.

  • DEPLOYMENT_NAME: the name of the Deployment object.

Display live configuration in YAML format

To view a Deployment object's manifest, run:

kubectl --kubeconfig KUBERNETES_CLUSTER_KUBECONFIG -n NAMESPACE \
    get deployments DEPLOYMENT_NAME -o yaml

This command displays the Deployment object's live configuration in YAML format.

List pods

To list the Pod objects created by the deployment, run:

kubectl --kubeconfig KUBERNETES_CLUSTER_KUBECONFIG -n NAMESPACE \
    get pods -l KEY=VALUE

In this command, the -l flag lists all Pod objects with the specified key-value pair label in the specified cluster.

Replace the following:

  • KUBERNETES_CLUSTER_KUBECONFIG: the kubeconfig file for the cluster running the deployment.

  • NAMESPACE: the namespace. For shared clusters, this must be a project namespace. For standard clusters, it can be any namespace.

  • KEY: the key for the key-value pair label set in the deployment. For example, if the .template.metadata.labels field has the app: myapp label configured, the key is app.

  • VALUE: the value for the key-value pair label set in the deployment. For example, if the .template.metadata.labels field has the app: myapp label configured, the value is my-app.

For example, if you labeled the Deployment object app: my-app, you'd run the following command to see Pod objects with that label:

kubectl --kubeconfig /tmp/kubeconfig.yaml -n my-namespace \
    get pods -l app=my-app

Get specific pod information

To get information about a specific Pod object, run:

kubectl --kubeconfig KUBERNETES_CLUSTER_KUBECONFIG -n NAMESPACE \
    describe pod POD_NAME

Replace the following:

  • KUBERNETES_CLUSTER_KUBECONFIG: the kubeconfig file for the cluster running the deployment.

  • NAMESPACE: the namespace. For shared clusters, this must be a project namespace. For standard clusters, it can be any namespace.

  • POD_NAME: the name of the pod managed by the deployment.

What's next