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Minikube + Inspektor Gadget! <3

Qasim Sarfraz
Ā· 2 min read

TL; DR: Inspektor Gadget is now available as an addon in Minikube.

When creating a tool for Kubernetes, it's crucial to be able to test it with various cluster configurations. In the case of Inspektor Gadget, we wanted to:

  • Run it against a cluster of multiple Kubernetes nodes.
  • Test it against different container runtimes. (docker, containerd and cri-o).
  • Validate our changes locally without pushing the image to a container registry.
  • Cover the above scenarios both in the development and in the Continuous Integration (CI) pipeline quickly.

With minikube we can start a cluster locally using minikube start and combining it with flags like --container-runtime or --nodes as needed. We use the same flow to test our changes in GitHub Actions as:

test-integration-minikube:
    name: Integration Tests
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    strategy:
      fail-fast: false
      matrix:
        runtime: [docker, containerd, cri-o]
    steps:
    - name: Setup minikube
      uses: ./.github/actions/setup-minikube
      with:
        runtime: ${{ matrix.runtime }}
        multi-node: true
    - name: Run integration tests
      uses: ./.github/actions/run-integration-tests
    . . .
    . . .

So minikube works great when developing and testing cloud-native applications. On the other hand, having a deeper understanding of the applications when running in a minikube cluster would be fantastic and Inspektor Gadget might just be the right tool for it. To facilitate this, now you can use the inspektor-gadget addon in minikube v1.31.0:

$ minikube addons enable inspektor-gadget
šŸŒŸ  The 'inspektor-gadget' addon is enabled
$ kubectl get pods -n gadget
NAME           READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
gadget-zwln9   1/1     Running   0          19s

Afterward, you can interact with the cluster using kubectl-gadget. Here is an example using the tcp top gadget:

$ kubectl gadget top tcp --all-namespaces
NODE       NAMESPACE       POD                      CONTAINER        PID      COMM          IP REMOTE  LOCAL  SENT          RECV
minikube   kube-system     kube-apiserver-minikube  kube-apiserver   762760   kube-apiservā€¦ 6  :0      :0     68.29KiB      541B
minikube   kube-system     etcd-minikube            etcd             762749   etcd          4  :0      :0     47.61KiB      331B
minikube   kube-system     kube-apiserver-minikube  kube-apiserver   762760   kube-apiservā€¦ 6  :0      :0     15.39KiB      117B
minikube   kube-system     kube-scheduler-minikube  kube-scheduler   762764   kube-schedulā€¦ 4  :0      :0     2.49KiB       564B

The list of gadgets is available here. Feel free to try the addon and share your valuable feedback. We would like to thank the minikube maintainers for their reviews and Santhosh Nagaraj (@yolossn) for making it happen!

Happy Inspekting!