<p>As mentioned <a href="https://docs.harness.io/article/wnr5n847b1-kubernetes-overview#what_does_harness_deploy" rel="nofollow noreferrer">here</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Harness takes the artifacts and <strong>Kubernetes manifests</strong> you provide
and deploys them to the target Kubernetes cluster. You can simply
deploy Kubernetes objects via manifests and you can provide manifests
using remote sources and Helm charts.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/8tEHl.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/8tEHl.png" alt="enter image description here" /></a></p>
<hr />
<p>Is harness tool equipped with <code>kubectl</code> client tool to perform <code>kubectl apply</code> on kubernetes manifests?</p>

overexchange
<p>If you're curious about the implementation details of the specific tool that are not explained in its official documentation, you should study directly its source code to find the answer.</p>
<p>But answering your specific question:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Is harness tool equipped with kubectl client tool to perform kubectl
apply on kubernetes manifest?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Well, it doesn't have to. Writing a tool which in its code uses a console <code>kubectl</code> client isn't very optimal and doesn't make much sense. For performing exactly the same actions that <code>kubectl</code> does, such tools use <a href="https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/using-api/client-libraries/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Client Libraries</a>. As you can see in the official docs, there is large variety of them, some of them are officialy supported, others are community-maintained, but altogether they support various programming languages.</p>
<p>Of course, you can write an external tool which doesn't use client libraries but implements the API calls and request/response types on its own.</p>
