I have written a following piece of code to achieve the functionality of creating k8s resources from its json/yaml file:

def create_from_yaml(yaml_file):
    """

    :param yaml_file:
    :return:
    """

    yaml_object = yaml.loads(common.load_file(yaml_file))
    group, _, version = yaml_object["apiVersion"].partition("/")
    if version == "":
        version = group
        group = "core"

    group = "".join(group.split(".k8s.io,1"))
    func_to_call = "{0}{1}Api".format(group.capitalize(), version.capitalize())

    k8s_api = getattr(client, func_to_call)()

    kind = yaml_object["kind"]
    kind = re.sub('(.)([A-Z][a-z]+)', r'\1_\2', kind)
    kind = re.sub('([a-z0-9])([A-Z])', r'\1_\2', kind).lower()

    if "namespace" in yaml_object["metadata"]:
        namespace = yaml_object["metadata"]["namespace"]
    else:
        namespace = "default"

    try:
        if hasattr(k8s_api, "create_namespaced_{0}".format(kind)):
            resp = getattr(k8s_api, "create_namespaced_{0}".format(kind))(
                body=yaml_object, namespace=namespace)
        else:
            resp = getattr(k8s_api, "create_{0}".format(kind))(
                body=yaml_object)
    except Exception as e:
        raise e

    print("{0} created. status='{1}'".format(kind, str(resp.status)))

    return k8s_api

In above function, If you provide any object yaml/json file, it will automatically pick up the API type and object type and create the object like statefulset, deployment, service etc.

PS: The above code doesn't handler multiple kubernetes resources in one file, so you should have only one object per yaml file.

I see what you are looking for. This is possible with other k8s clients available in other languages. Here is an example in java. Unfortunately the python client library does not support that functionality yet. I opened a new feature request requesting the same and you can either choose to track it or contribute yourself :). Here is the link for the issue on GitHub.

The other way to still do what you are trying to do is to use java/golang client and put your code in a docker container.

Update in the year 2020, for anyone still interested in this (since the docs for the python library is mostly empty).

At the end of 2018 this pull request has been merged, so it's now possible to do:

from kubernetes import client, config
from kubernetes import utils

config.load_kube_config()
api = client.ApiClient()

file_path = ... # A path to a deployment file
namespace = 'default'

utils.create_from_yaml(api, file_path, namespace=namespace)