Kubernetes

Cockpit has a dashboard that interacts with a Kubernetes cluster or an Openshift v3 cluster. This functionality is in the Cockpit kubernetes package.

Cockpit communicates with Kubernetes via its REST API. In order to access this API, usually some form of authentication is necessary. Like the kubectl and oc commands, Cockpit uses the authentication and server information in the ~/.kube/config file for the logged in user.

If a user is able to use kubectl successfully when at their shell terminal, then that same user will able to use Kubernetes dashboard when logged into Cockpit:

$ kubectl get pods
NAME                      READY     STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
docker-registry-1-l4pyh   1/1       Running   10         23d
...

When running Openshift one can use the oc login command to configure the ~/.kube/config file correctly. This in turn allows Cockpit to use that login information.