Switch Between Kubernetes Clusters Quickly

If you have more than one cluster to deal with, this can save you some time

Photo by Leo Rivas on Unsplash

Context is Key

If you use kubectl , most of your commands are going to rely on what your current kubeconfig is set up with.

When you have more than one Cluster you have to switch between, you’ll probably see something like this when you run kubectl config get-contexts

CURRENT   NAME          CLUSTER                                  
          cluster-1     arn:aws:eks:us-east-1:X:cluster/cluster-1
          cluster-2     arn:aws:eks:us-east-1:X:cluster/cluster-2
*         cluster-3     arn:aws:eks:us-east-2:X:cluster/cluster-3

Granted, you’ll have a few more columns and they’ll wrap, but this is probably the most important part of the output: the cluster and the name. The star next to the context name lets you know which one is the current one.

So what would you do to set your contexts normally? Well you might…

List Your Configs, Then Pick One

This was my standard workflow for a long time. I would run:

$ kubectl config get-contexts
CURRENT   NAME          CLUSTER                                  
          cluster-1     arn:aws:eks:us-east-1:X:cluster/cluster-1…