How to connect to Google Kubernetes clusters in parallel

Tue, 02 Feb 2021 18:00:00 -0100

In this post I’m going to talk through the approach I use to switch between multiple Google Kubernetes Engine clusters on the command line. I’d expect a lot of the stuff in here has some benefit for non-GCP Kubernetes clusters too, but the ones I use on a day-to-day basis are all hosted there.

Key outcomes for me were:

To be able to switch from one cluster to another with only a small number of commands, even if I have to authenticate with different user accounts (as primarily a GCP user, this means different email addresses / GCP projects).
To be connected to different Kubernetes in different windows - for example tailing logs in a Prod & Non-Prod cluster at the same time - and for that connection to persist across multiple kubectl commands.

Spoiler Alert: I solved this with a bit of fiddling of ~/.kube/config plus the marvellous kubie.

Kubectl on alexos.dev

How to connect to Google Kubernetes clusters in parallel