Managing Kubernetes Clusters Efficiently with K9s Terminal UI

When working with multiple Kubernetes clusters, administrators and developers often use kubectl commands and kube config contexts to switch between clusters. While this is a powerful approach, it requires users to remember various commands and context names, which can become difficult as the number of clusters grows.

For those who prefer a more interactive way to manage Kubernetes environments, tools with user-friendly interfaces can simplify day to day operations. In this blog, we will learn about K9s, a terminal based user interface that provides an efficient way to interact with Kubernetes clusters. K9s enables users to navigate resources, monitor workloads, view logs, and manage clusters directly from the terminal.

Prerequisites: This blog is demonstrated on Windows, and Chocolatey should be installed on your machine.

Visualizing Kafka Clusters Using Kafka UI in Kind

In the previous blog, we discussed how to set up an Apache Kafka cluster on Kind (Kubernetes in Docker) and how to interact with it using Kafka tools. While command-line utilities are useful, managing and monitoring Kafka becomes much easier with a graphical interface. In this blog, we will explore Kafka UI, a web-based tool that provides a convenient way to view topics, inspect messages, monitor consumer groups, track offsets and lag, and manage Kafka clusters without relying solely on the command line.

Pre-requisites:

• Kafka running on Kind

Fix "unknown error: cannot find Chrome binary" Failure in UI Test Execution Using Test Clients in Azure DevOps Pipelines.

 This blog explains one of the issues faced by Test Automation team when executing the UI test scripts using Chrome web driver. Lets have a look at, what is the process Test Automation team followed and the issue encountered. Importantly let's see how it can be resolved. 

In the UI test scripts developed with Spec flow, Selenium and C#, the purpose is to run automated UI test using a CD pipeline. Team has setup a Azure DevOps agent to run in interactive mode and installed the chrome web browser in the agent VM. Once, pipelines are  executing the UI test automation using the test agent it has reported the following error.

System.AggregateException : One or more errors occurred. (unknown error: cannot find Chrome binary) (unknown error: cannot find Chrome binary)

---- OpenQA.Selenium.WebDriverException : unknown error: cannot find Chrome binary

---- OpenQA.Selenium.WebDriverException : unknown error: cannot find Chrome binary

Using Sikuli & Selenium in VS to Detect the Undetectable

While doing GUI automation, We can identify few limitations of the selenium web driver.

• Selenium web driver does not support flash objects.
• Selenium web driver automate only web applications.

Other than these web driver limitations,some times you may have to write automation scripts, while you do not have easy access to GUI’s internal code.