Namespaces can be used to further separate resource usage and to provide limited environments for particular use cases. By default, Kubernetes configures a namespace for Kubernetes system components and a standard namespace to be used for all other deployments for which no namespace is defined.

To view existing namespaces, use the kubectl get namespaces and kubectl describe namespaces commands.

The kubectl command only displays resources in the default namespace, unless you set the namespace specifically for a request. Therefore, if you need to view the pods specific to the Kubernetes system, you would use the --namespace option to set the namespace to kube-system for the request. For example, in a cluster with a single master node:

$ kubectl get pods --namespace=kube-system
NAME                                    READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
coredns-5bc65d7f4b-qzfcc                1/1     Running   0          23h
coredns-5bc65d7f4b-z64f2                1/1     Running   0          23h
etcd-master1.example.com                1/1     Running   0          23h
kube-apiserver-master1.example.com      1/1     Running   0          23h
kube-controller-master1.example.com     1/1     Running   0          23h
kube-flannel-ds-2sjbx                   1/1     Running   0          23h
kube-flannel-ds-njg9r                   1/1     Running   0          23h
kube-proxy-m2rt2                        1/1     Running   0          23h
kube-proxy-tbkxd                        1/1     Running   0          23h
kube-scheduler-master1.example.com      1/1     Running   0          23h
kubernetes-dashboard-7646bf6898-d6x2m   1/1     Running   0          23h