Using connects

Blackbird cluster (powered by Telepresence) allows you to connect to a cluster from your local machine, so you can code locally and run the majority of your services within a remote Kubernetes cluster. Ultimately, this empowers you to develop services locally and still test integrations with dependent services or data stores running in the remote cluster.

After you establish a connection, you can intercept traffic from a Kubernetes service and route it to your local machine, enabling your local environment to function as if it were running in the cluster. For more information, see Using intercepts.

Prerequisites

• You downloaded the Blackbird CLI. For more information, see Getting started with the Blackbird CLI.
• You installed the Traffic Manager. For more information, see Using the Traffic Manager.
• You can access a Kubernetes cluster using the Kubernetes CLI (kubectl) or the OpenShift CLI (oc).
• Your application is deployed in the cluster and accessible using a Kubernetes service.
• You have a local copy of the service ready to run on your local machine.

Connecting to a cluster

To connect to a cluster:

1. Connect to your cluster.

2. Verify that you can reach the cluster's API or another internal service. For example, run a curl command to a service endpoint (e.g., curl -vk https://kubernetes.default). You should see the expected response or a 401 response. The 401 response is expected if you aren't providing credentials. If you can reach the endpoint, it was successful.

   Note: After you set up your connection, you can create intercepts to route traffic for your cluster's service to your local machine. For more information, see Using intercepts.

3. When you're ready, end the connection and all daemons.

   For detailed information about cluster commands and options, see Cluster in the Blackbird CLI Reference.