Start with the nodes. There is one.

The columns are NAME, STATUS, ROLES, AGE and VERSION. VERSION is the kubelet version on that node. -o wide adds the IP, OS and container runtime:

kubectl get nodes -o wide

Describe the node

describe prints everything the API server knows about an object, formatted for reading:

kubectl describe node shallows-node-1

Find these sections:

• Conditions: Ready must be True. MemoryPressure, DiskPressure and PIDPressure should be False.
• Capacity and Allocatable: CPU, memory and the Pod limit.
• System Info: kernel, OS image, container runtime, kubelet version.

The system workloads

The control plane add-ons run as normal Pods in the kube-system namespace:

kubectl get pods -n kube-system
kubectl get deployments -n kube-system

CoreDNS answers cluster DNS. metrics-server collects CPU and memory. The local-path provisioner creates storage on the node. Count the Deployments for the objective.

version prints the client and server versions. cluster-info prints where the API server and the add-on endpoints are:

kubectl version

$ kubectl cluster-info
Kubernetes control plane is running at https://10.0.0.10:6443
CoreDNS is running at https://10.0.0.10:6443/api/v1/namespaces/kube-system/services/kube-dns:dns/proxy

Label the node

Labels work on Nodes the same way they work on Pods:

kubectl label node shallows-node-1 role=training
kubectl get node shallows-node-1 --show-labels