introspect

🎯 What is Introspect?

Introspect is a go-based web application designed to demonstrate and explore Kubernetes capabilities, showcaseing a few cloud-native patterns, features, and integrations. It provides a modern web interface with multiple interactive features and serves a teaching tool for containerized applications running in Kubernetes environments.

✨ Features

• Kubernetes Runtime Environment: Inspect environment variables, configuration, and runtime information
• Database Integrations: Work with MongoDB, etcd, and Valkey (Redis-compatible)
• Kubernetes Operators: Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) and controller patterns
• Leadership Election: Distributed coordination using Kubernetes leases
• Admission Webhooks: Validation webhook implementation
• Observability: Prometheus metrics, health checks, and logging
• Cookie Management: Session handling and cookie inspection
• HPA Simulation: Workload is generated (with fractals from the Mandelbrot set) for scaling demonstration with HPA.

🛠️ Prerequisites

To develop and test Introspect locally, you'll need the following tools installed on your laptop:

Required Tools

1. Go (1.25.4 or later)

2. kubectl (for interacting with Kubernetes clusters)

3. Docker (for building container images)

4. Kubernetes Cluster (e.g. Kind)

5. Tilt (for local development workflow)

6. Make (for build automation)

   # Check version
   go version
   kubectl version --client
   docker --version
   kind version
   tilt version
   make --version

Optional Tools

• Helm (for managing dependencies like MongoDB, etcd)
• cfssl (for TLS certificate generation)
• direnv (for environment variable management)

🚀 Local Development with Tilt

Tilt provides a fast, iterative development experience for Kubernetes applications. It automatically rebuilds, deploys, and updates your application as you make changes.

Quick Start

1. Create a Kubernetes Cluster:

   # Using Kind
   make kind-up
   
   # Or manually
   kind create cluster --config kind.yaml --wait 5m

2. Start Tilt:

   tilt up

3. Access the Tilt UI:

   • Open your browser to http://localhost:10350
   • The Tilt UI shows build status, logs, and resource health

4. Access the Application:

   • Once deployed, the application is available at http://localhost:9090
   • Tilt automatically port-forwards the service

5. Clean up:

   • Stop the running tilt up server with crlt-c. Then run tilt down to clean up resources:

   tilt down

📁 Project Structure

introspect/
├── cmd/                          # Application entry points
│   ├── main.go                   # Main entry point
│   └── introspect/               # CLI commands
│       ├── root.go               # Root command and config
│       └── server.go             # Server command
│
├── pkg/                          # Application packages
│   ├── ...                       # Various demos
│   ├── server/                   # HTTP server
│   └── version/                  # Version information
│
├── tmpl/                         # HTML templates
│   ├── layout.html               # Base layout template
│   ├── ...                       # Various demo templates
│
├── css/                          # Stylesheets
│   └── ...
│
├── kubernetes/                   # Kubernetes manifests
├── hack/                         # Development scripts
├── demo/                         # Demo scripts and examples
│
├── .github/                      # GitHub workflows
│
├── Tiltfile                      # Tilt configuration
├── Makefile                      # Build automation
├── Dockerfile                    # Main Dockerfile
├── go.mod                        # Go module definition
├── go.sum                        # Go module checksums
└── README.md                     # This file

🤝 Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please feel free to submit issues or pull requests.

📄 License

This project is licensed under the GPL-3.0 - see the LICENSE file for details.

🙏 Acknowledgments

Built with:

• Kubernetes
• Go
• Tilt
• controller-runtime
• Cobra
• and many, many more