All articles tagged #http

There are plenty of reasons to call the Kubernetes API using a CLI (like curl) or GUI (like postman) HTTP client. For instance, you may need finer-grained control over Kubernetes Objects than kubectl provides or just want to explore the API before trying to access it from code.

This article is not a mere list of handy commands but a thoughtful walk-through revealing some interesting problems you may stumble upon while calling the Kubernetes API from the command line. It covers the following topics:

• How to get the Kubernetes API server address
• How to authenticate the API server to clients
• How to authenticate clients to the API server using certificates
• How to authenticate clients to the API server using tokens
• Bonus: How to call the Kubernetes API from inside a Pod
• How to perform the basic CRUD operations on Kubernetes Objects with curl
• How to access the Kubernetes API directly using the kubectl's raw mode
• Bonus: How to see what API requests a kubectl command like apply sends.

Happy reading!

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These mysterious HTTP 502s happened to me already twice over the past few years. Since the amount of service-to-service communications every year goes only up, I expect more and more people to experience the same issue. So, sharing it here.

TL;DR: HTTP Keep-Alive between a reverse proxy and an upstream server combined with some misfortunate downstream- and upstream-side timeout settings can make clients receiving HTTP 502s from the proxy.

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Go standard library makes it super easy to start an HTTP server:

package main

import "net/http"

func main() {
    http.HandleFunc("/", func(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
        w.Write([]byte("Hello there!\n"))
    })

    http.ListenAndServe(":8080", nil)
}

...or send an HTTP request:

package main

import "net/http"

func main() {
    resp, err := http.Get("http://example.com/")
    body, err := io.ReadAll(resp.Body)
}

In just ~10 lines of code, I can get a server up and running or fetch a real web page! In contrast, creating a basic HTTP server in C would take hundreds of lines, and anything beyond basics would require third-party libraries.

The Go snippets from above are so short because they rely on powerful high-level abstractions of the net and net/http packages. Go pragmatically chooses to optimize for frequently used scenarios, and its standard library hides many internal socket details behind these abstractions, making lots of default choices on the way. And that's very handy, but...

What if I need to fine-tune net/http sockets before initiating the communication? For instance, how can I set some socket options like SO_REUSEPORT or TCP_QUICKACK?

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Maybe the scenario I'm going to describe is just a silly bug no seasoned Go developer would ever make, but it is what it is.

I'm not an expert in Go but I do write code in this language from time to time. My cumulative number of LOC is probably still below 100 000 but it's definitely not just a few hundred lines of code. Go always looked like a simple language to me. But also it looked safe. Apparently, it's not as simple and safe as I've thought...

Here is a synthetic piece of code illustrating the erroneous logic I stumbled upon recently:

// main.go
package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "sync"
)

func main() {
    mutex := &sync.Mutex{}

    f := func() {
        fmt.Println("In f()")

        defer func() {
            if r := recover(); r != nil {
                fmt.Println("Recovered", r)
            }
        }()

        dogs := []string{"Lucky"}

        mutex.Lock()
        fmt.Println("Last dog's name is", dogs[len(dogs)])
        mutex.Unlock()
    }

    f()

    fmt.Println("About to get a deadlock in main()")
    mutex.Lock()
}

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