Use Sonobuoy for end-to-end conformance testing of your Kubernetes cluster

Currently, there are about 70+ distributions of Kubernetes available, would it be good if there are a set of conformance tests to make sure that a Kubernetes cluster meets the minimal set of features? Sonobuoy is a diagnostic tool that makes it easier to understand the state of a Kubernetes cluster by running a set of Kubernetes conformance tests in an accessible and non-destructive manner. It is a customizable, extendable, and cluster-agnostic way to generate clear, informative reports about your cluster.

To get a basic understanding of Kubernetes concepts, please refer to earlier posts for understanding on Kubernetes & how to create, deploy & rollout updates to the cluster.

Conformance-passing cluster provides the following guarantees

• Best practices: Your Kubernetes is properly configured. This is useful to know whether you are running a distribution out of the box or handling your own custom setup.
• Predictability: All your cluster behavior is well-documented. Available features in the official Kubernetes documentation can be taken as a given. Unexpected bugs should be rare because distribution-specific issues are weeded out during the conformance tests.
• Interoperability: Workloads from other conforming clusters can be ported into your cluster or vice versa. This standardization of Kubernetes is a key advantage of open source software and allows you to avoid vendor lock-in.

In addition to conformance testing, Sonobuoy also supports a plugin model. In this model, worker pods are dispatched into the cluster to collect data from each node and use an aggregation URL to submit their results back to a waiting aggregation pod. This enables you to integrate conformance test results into your reporting.

How to perform conformance testing?

Sonobuoy leverages Kubernetes end-to-end testing plugin (the e2e plugin) to run conformance tests that are maintained by the Kubernetes community. Before we get into conformance testing, let’s look at the prerequisites

Prerequisites

• Kubernetes cluster
• KUBECONFIG environment variable set

Step #1.Install Sonobuoy

Download the latest release for your platform

Extract the tarball

Move the extracted sonobuoy executable to /usr/local/bin

Step #2.Run Sonobuoy conformance tests

Use the sonobuoy run command to start conformance testing.It creates a few resources in order to run and expects to run within its own namespace.

You can also run with option --mode quick to quickly run the conformance tests

Step #3.Inspect results

Export the results using the command export results=$(sonobuoy retrieve)

Use the sonobuoy delete command to remove its namespace as well as a few cluster scoped resources.

For detailed information about the conformance tests, plugins, and snapshots, check out the documentation here.

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