kubectl

For production applications running in containerized infrastructure (e.g. Kubernetes, ECS, Docker Swarm, etc.)—and even for more traditional infrastructure with multiple application servers (for horizontal scalability), it is important to have centralized, persistent logging of some sort or another.

Some services like the ELK/EFK stack, SumoLogic, and Splunk offer a robust feature set for full text searching, filtering, and 'log intelligence'. On the other end of the spectrum, you can use a simple aggregator like rsyslogd or CloudWatch Logs without a fancy system on top if you just need basic central log storage.

But when I'm debugging something in a Kubernetes cluster—especially something like an internal service which I may not want to have logging everything to a central logging system (for cost or performance reasons)—it's often helpful to see all the logs from all pods in a Deployment or Replication Controller at the same time.

You can always stream logs from a single Pod with the command:

Most of the time, when I install software on my Docker images, I add a rather hairy RUN command which does something like:

1. Install some dependencies for key management.
2. Add a GPG key for a new software repository.
3. Install software from that new software repository.
4. Clean up apt/yum/dnf caches to save a little space.

This is all well and good; and this is the most recommended way to install kubectl in most situations, but it's not without it's drawbacks: