Logs play several roles during an application’s lifecycle. They help to debug problems - some give us analytical data (like access logs) - and help provide an overview of an application’s state at a given moment. This requires different modes of access and visualization, and, because of the distinct behavior involved in each outcome, we often end up using different tools. For example: for tailing logs live, we use Loki, for complex visualizations we prefer Elasticsearch, and to archive logs, we prefer object storage (like Amazon S3).

It may not be a well-known fact, but a Kubernetes API server can proxy HTTP connections between a client and any service running on a cluster. A simple kubectl command exists that allows it: $ kubectl proxy Starting to serve on 127.0.0.1:8001 We use this for demo purposes or when we don’t want to expose APIs publicly, but need to access them from our computers. Moreover, this proxy can transport WebSocket connections.