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Most Useful Kubernetes Tricks
Govardhana M K
August 12, 2025
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IN TODAY'S EDITION
🧠 Use Case
Most Useful Kubernetes Tricks
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🧠 USE CASE
Most Useful Kubernetes Tricks
We tend to look for lateral, highly diversified options to learn, understand, and equip ourselves with the knowledge to run, troubleshoot, and live with Kubernetes, yet we seldom use the simplest and most native options.
Two such options, which have greatly helped me and many others but are equally greatly ignored, are Kubectl explain and Kubectl aliases.
Kubectl explain
With kubectl installation, you can use kubectl explain which is greatly helpful to quickly understand Kubernetes resource definitions and their fields.
For example: kubectl explain pod shows that a Pod is a collection of containers that can run on a host, created by clients and scheduled onto hosts. It then lists its main fields apiVersion (schema version), kind (type of resource), metadata (object details), spec (desired behavior), and status (current state).
kubectl explain pod output
You can apply this same approach to explore resources like node, service, and deployment etc.,
You don’t need any expensive and exhaustive documentation, you can learn about Kubernetes resources right within your terminal.
Kubectl aliases
Be it you are preparing for Kubernetes certification exams or you are involved in troubleshooting day in and day out, as many Kubernetes engineers are, typing long kubectl commands repeatedly can be time consuming and error prone. Aliases give you the ability to map frequently used, verbose commands to short, memorable keystrokes.
For example: Instead of typing kubectl get pods --all-namespaces every time, you could simply run kgpa
While debugging, commands like kubectl describe pod <pod-name> can be shortened to kdesc <pod-name>
These can be added to your ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc so they’re always available in your terminal session. Reload your shell (source ~/.bashrc) and your muscle memory will start kicking in, cutting command execution time dramatically.