Describe

Describes current resources

TL;DR

  • Print verbose debug information about a Resource

Describe Resources

Motivation

Describe is a higher level printing operation that may aggregate data from other sources in addition to the Resource being queried (e.g. Events).

Describe pulls out the most important information about a Resource from the Resource itself and related Resources, and formats and prints this information on multiple lines.

  • Aggregates data from related Resources
  • Formats Verbose Output for debugging
  1. kubectl describe deployments
  1. Name:                   nginx
  2. Namespace:              default
  3. CreationTimestamp:      Thu, 15 Nov 2018 10:58:03 -0800
  4. Labels:                 app=nginx
  5. Annotations:            deployment.kubernetes.io/revision=1
  6. Selector:               app=nginx
  7. Replicas:               1 desired | 1 updated | 1 total | 1 available | 0 unavailable
  8. StrategyType:           RollingUpdate
  9. MinReadySeconds:        0
  10. RollingUpdateStrategy:  25% max unavailable, 25% max surge
  11. Pod Template:
  12.   Labels:  app=nginx
  13.   Containers:
  14.    nginx:
  15.     Image:        nginx
  16.     Port:         <none>
  17.     Host Port:    <none>
  18.     Environment:  <none>
  19.     Mounts:       <none>
  20.   Volumes:        <none>
  21. Conditions:
  22.   Type           Status  Reason
  23.   -             
  24.   Progressing    True    NewReplicaSetAvailable
  25.   Available      True    MinimumReplicasAvailable
  26. OldReplicaSets:  <none>
  27. NewReplicaSet:   nginx-78f5d695bd (1/1 replicas created)
  28. Events:          <none>

Get vs Describe

When Describing a Resource, it may aggregate information from several other Resources. For instance Describing a Node will aggregate Pod Resources to print the Node utilization.

When Getting a Resource, it will only print information available from reading that Resource. While Get may aggregate data from the fields of that Resource, it won’t look at fields from other Resources.