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Introducing Hydrophone

By Ricky Sadowski (ICR) |

In the ever-changing landscape of Kubernetes, ensuring that clusters operate as intended is essential. This is where conformance testing becomes crucial, verifying that a Kubernetes cluster meets the required standards set by the community. Today, we’re thrilled to introduce Hydrophone, a lightweight runner designed to streamline Kubernetes tests using the official conformance images released by the Kubernetes release team.

Simplified Kubernetes testing with Hydrophone

Hydrophone’s design philosophy centers around ease of use. By starting the conformance image as a pod within the conformance namespace, Hydrophone waits for the tests to conclude, then prints and exports the results. This approach offers a hassle-free method for running either individual tests or the entire Conformance Test Suite.

Key features of Hydrophone

  • Ease of Use: Designed with simplicity in mind, Hydrophone provides an easy-to-use tool for conducting Kubernetes conformance tests.
  • Official Conformance Images: It leverages the official conformance images from the Kubernetes Release Team, ensuring that you’re using the most up-to-date and reliable resources for testing.
  • Flexible Test Execution: Whether you need to run a single test, the entire Conformance Test Suite, or anything in between.

Streamlining Kubernetes conformance with Hydrophone

In the Kubernetes world, where providers like EKS, Rancher, and k3s offer diverse environments, ensuring consistent experiences is vital. This consistency is anchored in conformance testing, which validates whether these environments adhere to Kubernetes community standards. Historically, this validation has either been cumbersome or requires third-party tools. Hydrophone offers a simple, single binary tool that streamlines running these essential conformance tests. It’s designed to be user-friendly, allowing for straightforward validation of Kubernetes clusters against community benchmarks, ensuring providers can offer a certified, consistent service.

Hydrophone doesn’t aim to replace the myriad of Kubernetes testing frameworks out there but rather to complement them. It focuses on facilitating conformance tests efficiently, without developing new tests or heavy integration with other tools.

Getting started with Hydrophone

Installing Hydrophone is straightforward. You need a Go development environment; once you have that:

go install sigs.k8s.io/hydrophone@latest

Running hydrophone by default will:

  • Create a pod, and supporting resources in the conformance namespace on your cluster.
  • Execute the entire conformance test suite for the cluster version you’re running.
  • Output the test results and export e2e.log and junit_01.xml needed for conformance validation.

There are supporting flags to specify which tests to run, which to skip, the cluster you’re targeting and much more!

Community and contributions

The Hydrophone project is part of SIG Testing and open to the community for bugs, feature requests, and other contributions. You can engage with the project maintainers via Kubernetes Slack channels #hydrophone, #sig-testing, and #k8s-conformance, or by filing an issue against the repository. We’re also active in the Kubernetes SIG-Testing and SIG-Release Mailing Lists. We encourage pull requests and discussions to make Hydrophone even better.

Join us in simplifying Kubernetes testing

In SIG Testing, we believe Hydrophone will be a valuable tool for anyone looking to validate the conformance of their Kubernetes clusters easily. Whether you’re developing new features, or testing your application, Hydrophone offers an efficient testing experience.