Representing Kubernetes resources

Kubernetes resources can generally be represented as either a JSON or YAML data structure. Kubernetes is specifically built so that you can save these files, and when you want to run your software, you can use a command such as kubectl deploy and provide the definitions you've created previously, and it uses that to run your software. In our next chapter, we will start to show specific examples of these resources and build them up for our use.

As we get into the examples in the next, and future chapters, we will use YAML to describe our resources and request data through kubectl back in JSON format. All of these data structures are formally defined for each version of Kubernetes, along with the REST APIs that Kubernetes provides to manipulate them. The formal definitions of all Kubernetes resources are maintained with OpenAPI (also known as Swagger) in source code control, and can be viewed at https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/tree/master/api/swagger-spec.