5 Fun Ways to Use Kubernetes

Learning is a natural process that takes place throughout our lives. Yet the passion of learning that we cultivate as children seems to vanish as we grow older and enter society. However, learning should be an exciting, inspiring, and transformative process.

If you are discovering Kubernetes, or even if you are already using it in production, these tools will give you a fun and gamified approach to learn Kubernetes, explore your workloads, and experiment with the resources of your cluster.

KubeCraftAdmin

Have you ever thought to yourself: Why don’t we have an immersive 3D sandbox user interface to manage workloads on my favorite container orchestrator? No? Well, here it is anyway. That was the question that Eric Jadi asked before starting developing KubeCraftAdmin.

KubeCraftAdmin : The Adventurer's Admin Tool

The developer states that the inspiration for KubeCraft Admin come from watching a video on the MakeCode platform which showed that it’s possible through a WebSocket server to programmatically manipulate the world in Minecraft.

My project populates the world with different animals in different pens (one for each namespace). The animals each correspond to a resource in your k8s cluster. Pigs are Pods, Cows are ReplicaSets, Chickens are Services and Horses are Deployments. Once you connect to the KubeCraft Admin WS and stand on the beacon, connection is made to the designated k8s cluster. Animals will spawn to reflect the cluster state. Animals will die when resources get deleted, conversely killing an animal in Minecraft will delete the corresponding resource.
Eric Jadi
KubeCraftAdmin developer

You can find more here and you can download the source code of this tool here.

Kube DOOM

Kube DOOM is a fun way to visualize and kill pods inside a Kubernetes cluster by shooting them while playing a video game. The original video game, Doom, focuses on the exploits of an unnamed space marine operating under the auspices of the Union Aerospace Corporation (UAC), who fights hordes of demons and the undead. Its first version was released in 1993 under MS-DOS.

Kube DOOM is is a fork of gideonred/dockerdoomd using a slightly modified Doom, forked from gideonred/dockerdoom, which was forked from psdoom.

Kill Kubernetes pods using Id's Doom!

You can get this tool here.

KubeInvaders

According to Principles of chaos engineering website, Chaos Engineering is the discipline of experimenting on a system in order to build confidence in the system’s capability to withstand turbulent conditions in production. To specifically address the uncertainty of distributed systems at scale, Chaos Engineering can be thought of as the facilitation of experiments to uncover systemic weaknesses. This may seem not easy to understand before putting in practice.

KubeInvaders allows you to put this in practice while playing Space Invaders. The developer of this tool describes it as "Chaos Engineering Tool for Kubernetes and Openshift". Through KubeInvaders you can stress Kubernetes cluster in a fun way and check how it is resilient.

Chaos Engineering Tool for Kubernetes and Openshift

The tool is accessible here.

kube-chaos

Another chaos engineering style game, kube-chaos is a twin-stick style shmup game. The game interfaces with a Kubernetes cluster and enable exploring the cluster nodes and destroy live, running pods on those nodes. The game logic is written in C# and is powered by the Unity engine.

In the game you enter and explore nodes in your cluster, and can destroy your very own live, running pods (source: shogan.co.uk)

The game logic was simple to put together. I have a couple of modular systems I’ve already developed (and actually sell on the Unity Asset Store), so those made the movement and shooting logic, as well as background grid effects a breeze. Movement is implemented in a simple ‘twin-stick’ controller Script (a Unity concept, which is a class implementing Monobehaviour). Other game logic is mostly contained in the bullet pattern module. I have some more Scripts that arrange and control the Kubernetes entities as well as their labels. The interaction with Kubernetes itself is fairly hacked together. I wanted to put the game together as quickly as possible as I only worked on it over a couple of weekend evenings.
Sean Duffy
Kube-chaos developer

You can read more on the original blog post here and download the source code of the game from the Github repository.

Whack-a-pod

Whack-a-pod is the name that Terrence Ryan gave, a Developer Advocate for Google Cloud Platform, to a demo that can be used to show how resilient services running on Kubernetes can be. This game turns a Kubernetes cluster into a Whack a Mole game, where the moles are pods.

Developers state that the main app shows a giant sign that flashes in various random colors. Those colors come a Kubernetes powered microservice. If the service goes down, the sign turns red. Your goal is to try and knock the service down by killing the Kubernetes pods that run the service. You can do that by whacking the pods wich are respresented as moles.

The current directions assume you are using Google Cloud Platform to take advantage of Container Engine to build a manage your Kubernetes cluster but there is nothing preventing this app from running on a Kubernetes cluster hosted elsewhere.

A demo application that turns a Kubernetes cluster into a Whack a Mole game, where the moles are pods.

You can find the source code on the Github repository.

Kubernetes in Virtual Reality

Who said that one day, you will be able to use your HTC vive to visualize your cluster Pods and enjoy an interactive experience while leveraging Kubernetes API service!?

Ryan van Niekerk, the developer who created this tool, states that his project is the first attempt to bring virtual infrastructure into an interactive Virtual Reality world. He was inspired to create this project by the previous “infrastructure in a game” prototypes of Dockercraft and Docker DOOM and he wanted to build upon these ideas and take them to another level.

Kuberenetes in Virtual Reality. Built using A-frame WebVR framework. Visualize and interact with Kubernetes pods in a Virtual world

This project was built for the 2016 Cloud Native Conference (Kubecon). It is very experimental.

According to the developer, If you want to run it in VR mode, you must have the following:

HTC Vive
An experimental build of Chrome from webvr.info
A local Kubernetes cluster and a running kubectl proxy --port=8090
The API server
The Frontend

However, if you don't have the HTC Vive, you can visualize the project in this video:

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