Useful kubectl commands

 

To get the list of all the nodes (physical nodes, e.g. EC2 instances in AWS EKS cluster) in the cluster:

kubectl get nodes

Output columns:

• NAME e.g. ip-10-2-12-73.us-east-1.compute.internal
• STATUS e.g. Ready
• ROLES    <none>
• AGE    e.g. 1d
• VERSION e.g. v1.32.9-eks-ecaa3a6

kubectl get nodes -L node.kubernetes.io/instance-type,topology.kubernetes.io/zone,karpenter.sh/capacity-type

Output columns:

• NAME e.g. ip-10-2-12-73.us-east-1.compute.internal
• STATUS e.g. Ready
• ROLES    <none>
• AGE    e.g. 1d
• VERSION e.g. v1.32.9-eks-ecaa3a6
• INSTANCE-TYPE e.g. m7g.2xlarge
• ZONE e.g. us-east-2a
• CAPACITY-TYPE e.g. on-demand

kubectl get nodes -o wide

Output columns:

• NAME e.g. ip-10-2-12-73.us-east-1.compute.internal
• STATUS e.g. Ready
• ROLES    <none>
• AGE    e.g. 1d
• VERSION e.g. v1.32.9-eks-ecaa3a6
• INTERNAL-IP e.g. 10.2.12.73
• EXTERNAL-IP e.g. <none> 
• OS-IMAGE e.g. Amazon Linux 2023.9.20251208
• KERNEL-VERSION e.g. 6.1.158-180.294.amzn2023.aarch64 or 6.1.132-147.221.amzn2023.x86_64
• CONTAINER-RUNTIME e.g.  containerd://2.1.5

kubectl get nodes -o jsonpath='{range .items[*]}{.metadata.name}{"\t"}{.spec.providerID}{"\n"}{end}'

Output:

ip-10-2-12-73.us-east-2.compute.internal aws:///us-east-2a/i-039a9aaafa975358f

ip-10-2-13-147.us-east-2.compute.internal aws:///us-east-2a/i-0627bbbb3c15da009

...

List all pods (by default the output is grouped by NAMESPACE):

kubectl get pods -A -o wide 

Output columns:

• NAMESPACE
• NAME                                            
• READY   (X/Y means X out of Y containers are ready)
• STATUS
• RESTARTS
• AGE
• IP
• NODE
• NOMINATED NODE
• READINESS GATES

List all pods and sort them by NODE:

kubectl get pods -A -o wide --sort-by=.spec.nodeName 

To get a list of all namespaces in the cluster:

kubectl get ns

Output columns:

• NAME e.g. default
• STATUS e.g. Active
• AGE e.g. 244d

...