Access Kubernetes API from a pod in C#

Ideally, I'd like to just use WebClient

The Kubernetes is a REST API, so this would work. As shown on Directly accessing the REST API using kubectl proxy it is easy to explore the API using e.g. curl.

Example with curl and kubectl proxy - response is in json format.

curl http://localhost:8080/api/v1/pods

The complicating factor is that you probably need a private certificate bundle, and it is good practice to properly validate this for security reasons. When accessing the API from a Pod, the client certificate is located on /var/run/secrets/kubernetes.io/serviceaccount/ca.crt and in addition, you need to authenticate using the token located on /var/run/secrets/kubernetes.io/serviceaccount/token

But do I really have to bring a whole client library on board just for a simple GET to a single endpoint?

What you get from a client library is:

• Implemented authentication using certificates and tokens
• Typed client access - instead of hand code urls and requests

The dotnet-client example shows how the "Typed client access" looks like, for "listing Pods in the default namespace" (see authentication alternatives):

var config = KubernetesClientConfiguration.InClusterConfig()  // auth from PodIKubernetes client = new Kubernetes(config);Console.WriteLine("Starting Request!");var list = client.ListNamespacedPod("default");foreach (var item in list.Items){    Console.WriteLine(item.Metadata.Name);}