julien-klaus/caboto

Caboto, the Kubernetes semantic analysis tool

Caboto

Caboto, the Kubernetes semantic analysis toolkit. It contains a lightweight Python library for semantic analysis of plain Kubernetes manifests without running a cluster.
Internally, Caboto represents all K8s objects in a graph structure based on NetworkX which allows following edges and make sense of the relations between objects.

Usage

To start with, load plain manifests files into Caboto. Please mind that you will have to generate Helm charts into plain Kubernetes manifests (in yaml format) in order to load them.
Hint: you may render your Helm charts in one yaml file like so:

helm template my-charts -n my-namespace my-charts/ -f values.yaml > ~/my-manifests/output.yaml

Caboto loads multiple yaml documents from one file if they are separated according to the yaml specification. Please call caboto.api.create_graph_from_path(path) which constructs the Caboto graph by recursively loading all yaml files from the path. Afterwards discover and represent all supported relations with caboto.api.discover_relations(...).

The idea is to prepare a collection of build-in analysis functions, e.g.

• list_applications(...) - returns a list of all applications, and their associated objects
• list_containerimages(...) - returns a list of all container images, and the Pods running them
• list_services(...) - returns a list of all Kubernetes service objects, and the Pods serving them

A full list of build-in analysis functions can be found in the documentation.

CLI

You can run Caboto as a CLI script using:

python caboto [ARGUMENTS]

For example, you can plot the Caboto graph using mathplotlib with python caboto -p. If the manifest files are not located in the current working directory please specifiy the path using the --manifests/-m option. Run an analysis function with the --run/-r argument plus the function name, like so python caboto -r list_applications

The Caboto graph for an average Kubernetes project may look like this:

Why Caboto?

Caboto is named after Giovanni Caboto, the earliest-known European explorer of coastal North America since the Norse. Please read on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cabot