50+ Useful Kubernetes Tools
In just two relatively short years, Kubernetes has laid waste to its fellow competitors in the battlefield of container orchestration. Sadly, Docker Swarm hasn’t been a major contender since 2016 and, like AWS, admitted defeat by pledging K8s support and integration.
Since Kubernetes has skyrocketed to popularity as the container solution of choice, here’s a comprehensive list of all the tools that complement K8s to further enhance your development work.
Kube Cluster Deployment Tools
1. Kubespray
Kubespray provides a set of Ansible roles for Kubernetes deployment and configuration. Kubespray can use AWS, GCE, Azure, OpenStack or a bare metal Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform. Kubespray is an open-source project with an open development model. The tool is a good choice for people who already know Ansible as there’s no need to use another tool for provisioning and orchestration. Kubespray uses kubeadm under the hood.
Link: https://github.com/kubernetes-incubator/kubespray
Cost: Free
2. Minikube
Minikube allows you to install and try out Kubernetes locally. The tool is a good starting point for Kubernetes exploration. Easily launch a single-node Kubernetes cluster inside a virtual machine (VM) on your laptop. Minikube is available on Windows, Linux, and OSX. In just 5 minutes you will be able to explore Kubernetes’ main features. Launch the Minikube dashboard straight-from-the-box with just one command.
Link: https://github.com/kubernetes/minikube
Cost: Free
3. Kubeadm
Kubeadm is a Kubernetes distribution tool since version 1.4. The tool helps to bootstrap best-practice Kubernetes clusters on existing infrastructure. Kubeadm cannot provision infrastructure for you though. Its main advantage is the ability to launch minimum viable Kubernetes clusters anywhere. Add-ons and networking setup are both out of Kubeadm’s scope though, so you will need to install this manually or using another tool.
Link: https://github.com/kubernetes/kubeadm
Cost: Free
4. Kops
Kops helps you create, destroy, upgrade, and maintain production-grade, highly available Kubernetes clusters from the command line. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is currently officially supported, with GCE in beta support, and VMware vSphere in alpha, and other platform support is planned. Kops allows you to control the full Kubernetes cluster lifecycle; from infrastructure provisioning to cluster deletion.
Link: https://github.com/kubernetes/kops
Cost: Free
5. Bootkube
Bootkube is a great tool for launching self-hosted Kubernetes clusters. It helps you set up a temporary Kubernetes control plane which will operate until the self-hosted control-plane is able to handle requests.
Link: https://github.com/kubernetes-incubator/bootkube
Cost: Free
6. Kubernetes on AWS (Kube-AWS)
Kube-AWS is a console tool provided by CoreOS which deploys a fully-functional Kubernetes cluster using AWS CloudFormation. Kube-AWS allows you to deploy a traditional Kubernetes cluster and automatically provision every K8s service with native AWS features (e.g., ELB, S3, and Auto Scaling, etc.).
Link: https://github.com/kubernetes-incubator/kube-aws
Cost: Free
7. SimpleKube
SimpleKube is a bash script which allows you to deploy a single-node Kubernetes cluster on a Linux server. While Minikube needs a hypervisor (VirtualBox, KVM), SimpleKube will install all K8s binaries into the server itself. Simplekube is tested on Debian 8/9 and Ubuntu 16.x/17.x. It’s a great tool for giving Kubernetes a first try.
Link: https://github.com/valentin2105/Simplekube
Cost: Free
8. Juju
Juju is an orchestrator from Canonical that allows you to remotely operate cloud provider solutions. Juju works at a higher level of abstraction than Puppet/Ansible/Chef and manages services instead of machines/VMs. Canonical made the great effort to provide what they call a suitable “Kubernetes-core bundle” in production. Juju is available as a dedicated tool with its own console/UI interface and also as a service (JaaS) which is free during the beta period.
Link: https://jujucharms.com/
Cost: Free Community Edition
Commercial Edition - from 200$ per year
9. Conjure-up
Conjure-up is another Canonical product which allows you to deploy “The Canonical Distribution of Kubernetes on Ubuntu” with a few simple commands. It supports AWS, GCE, Azure, Joyent, OpenStack, VMware, bare metal, and localhost deployments. Juju, MAAS, and LXD are the underlying technology for Conjure-up.
Link: https://conjure-up.io/
Cost: Free
10. Amazon EKS
Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS) is a managed service which makes it simple to deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications using Kubernetes. Amazon EKS manages your Kubernetes infrastructure across multiple AWS Availability Zones, while automatically detecting and replacing unhealthy control plane nodes, and providing on-demand upgrades and patching. You simply provision worker nodes and connect them to the provided Amazon EKS endpoint.
Link: https://aws.amazon.com/eks/
Cost: Pay for the resources used
Monitoring Tools
11. Kubebox
Kubebox is a terminal console for Kubernetes cluster which allows you to manage and monitor your cluster-live status with nice, old-school interface. Kubebox shows your pod resource usage, cluster monitoring, and container logs, etc. Additionally, you can easily navigate to the desired namespace and execute into the desired container for fast troubleshooting/recovery.
Link: https://github.com/astefanutti/kubebox
Cost: Free
12. Kubernetes Operational View (Kube-ops-view)
Kube-ops-view is a read-only system dashboard for multiple K8s clusters. With Kube-ops-view you can easily navigate between your cluster and monitor nodes as well as your pod’s healthiness. Kube-ops-view animates some Kubernetes processes such as pod creation and termination. It also uses Heapster as a source of data.
Link: https://github.com/hjacobs/kube-ops-view
Cost: Free
13. Kubetail
Kubetail is a small bash script which allows you to aggregate logs from multiple pods into one stream. The initial Kubetail version doesn’t have filtering or highlighting features, but there is an additional Kubetail fork on Github. This can form and perform logs coloring using multi-tail tools.
Link: https://github.com/johanhaleby/kubetailhttps://github.com/aks/kubetail
Cost: Free
14. Kubewatch
Kubewatch is a Kubernetes watcher which can publish K8s events to the team communication app, Slack. Kubewatch runs as a pod inside Kubernetes clusters and monitors changes that occur in the system. You can specify the notifications you want to receive by editing the configuration file.
Link: https://github.com/bitnami-labs/kubewatch
Cost: Free
15. Weave Scope
Weave Scope is a troubleshooting and monitoring tool for Docker and Kubernetes clusters. It can automatically generate applications and infrastructure topologies which can help you to identify application performance bottlenecks easily. You can deploy Weave Scope as a standalone application on your local server/laptop, or you can choose the Weave Scope Software as a Service (SaaS) solution on Weave Cloud. With Weave Scope, you can easily group, filter or search containers using names, labels, and/or resource consumption.
Link: https://www.weave.works/oss/scope/
Cost: Free in standalone mode
Standard mode - 30% per month (free 30-day trial)
Enterprise mode - 150$ per node/month
16. Searchlight
Searchlight by AppsCode is a Kubernetes operator for Icinga. Searchlight periodically runs various checks on Kubernetes clusters and alerts you via email, SMS or chat if something goes wrong. Searchlight includes a default suite of checks written specifically for Kubernetes. Also, it can enhance Prometheus monitoring with external black-box monitoring and serves as a fallback in case internal systems completely fail.
Link: https://github.com/appscode/searchlight
Cost: Free
17. Heapster
Heapster enables container cluster monitoring and performance analysis for Kubernetes. Heapster supports Kubernetes natively and can run as a pod on all K8s setups. Heapster’s data then can be pushed to a configurable backend for storage and visualization.
Link: https://github.com/kubernetes/heapster
Cost: Free
Testing
18. Kube-monkey
Kube-monkey is the Kubernetes’ version of Netflix's Chaos Monkey. Kube-monkey is a tool that follows the principles of chaos engineering. It can delete K8s pods at random, check services are failure-resilient, and contribute to your system’s healthiness. Kube-monkey is also configured by a TOML file where you can specify which app is to be killed and when to practice your recovery strategies.
Link: https://github.com/asobti/kube-monkey
Cost: Free
19. K8s-testsuite
K8s-testsuite is made up of 2 Helm charts which work for network bandwidth testing and load testing a single Kubernetes cluster. Load tests emulate simple web-servers with loadbots which run as a Kubernetes microservice based on the Vegeta. Network tests use iperf3 and netperf-2.7.0 internally and run three times. Both sets of tests generate comprehensive log messages with all results and metrics.
Link: https://github.com/mrahbar/k8s-testsuite
Cost: Free
20. Test-infra
Test-infra is a collection of tools for Kubernetes testing and results verification. Test-infra includes a few dashboards for displaying history, aggregating failures, and showing what is currently testing. You can enhance your test-infra suite by creating your own test jobs. Test-infra can perform end-to-end Kubernetes testing with full Kubernetes lifecycle emulation on different providers using the Kubetest tool.
Link: https://github.com/kubernetes/test-infra
Cost: Free
21. Sonobuoy
Sonobuoy allows you to understand your current Kubernetes cluster state by running a set of tests in an accessible and non-destructive manner. Sonobuoy generates informative reports with detailed information about cluster performance. Sonobuoy supports Kubernetes versions 1.8 and on. Sonobuoy Scanner is a browser-based tool which allows you to test Kubernetes clusters in a few clicks, but the CLI version has a bigger set of tests available.
Link: https://github.com/heptio/sonobuoy
Cost: Free
22. PowerfulSeal
PowerfulSeal is a tool similar to Kube-monkey and follows the Principles of Chaos Engineering. PowerfulSeal can kill pods and remove/add VMs from or to your clusters. In contrast to Kube-monkey, PowefulSeal has an interactive mode which allows you to manually break specific cluster components. Also, PowefulSeal doesn’t need external dependencies apart from SSH.
Link: https://github.com/bloomberg/powerfulseal
Cost: Free
Security
23. Trireme
Trireme is a flexible and straightforward implementation of the Kubernetes Network Policies. Trireme works in any Kubernetes cluster and allows you to manage traffic between pods from different clusters. The main advantages of Trireme are the lack of a need for any centralized policy management, the ability to easily organize the interaction of the two resources deployed in Kubernetes, and the lack of complexities of SDN, VLAN tags, and subnets (Trireme uses a conventional L3-network).
Link: https://github.com/aporeto-inc/trireme-kubernetes
Cost: Free
24. Aporeto
Aporeto provides security for containers, microservices, cloud and legacy applications based on workload identity, encryption, and distributed policies. As Aporeto policies function independently of the underlying infrastructure, security policies can be enabled across Kubernetes clusters or over hybrid environments that include Kubernetes and non-Kubernetes deployments.
Link: https://www.aporeto.com/
Cost: Contact Aporeto for a demo
25. Twistlock
Twistlock continually monitors your applications deployed on K8s for vulnerability and compliance issues, including the underlying host as well as containers and images. In addition, Twistlock Runtime Defense automatically models container behavior, allowing known, good behavior while alerting on or blocking anomalous activity. Finally, Twistlock provides both layer 3 microsegmentation as well as a layer 7 firewall that can protect front end microservices from common attacks.
Link: https://www.twistlock.com/
Cost: Contact Caylent directly for pricing or to request a free trial
26. Sysdig Falco
Sysdig Falco is a behavioral activity monitor designed to detect anomalous activity in your applications. Falco is based on the Sysdig Project, an open-source tool (and now a commercial service), built for monitoring container performance by way of tracking kernel system calls. Falco lets you continuously monitor and detect container, application, host, and network activity with one set of rules.
Link: https://sysdig.com/opensource/falco/
Cost: Free as a standalone tool
Basic Cloud: $20 per month (free trial)
Pro Cloud: $30 per month
Pro Software: Custom price
27. Sysdig Secure
Sysdig Secure, part of the Sysdig Container Intelligence Platform, comes out-of-the-box with unmatched container visibility and deep integrations with container orchestration tools. These include Kubernetes, Docker, AWS ECS, and Apache Mesos. With Sysdig Secure you can Implement service-aware policies, block attacks, analyze your history, and monitor cluster performance. Sysdig Secure is available as cloud and on-premise software offerings.
Link: https://sysdig.com/product/secure/
Cost: Free as a standalone tool
Pro Cloud: Custom price
Pro Software: Custom price
28. Kubesec.io
Kubesec.io is a service which allows you to score Kubernetes resources for security feature usage. Kubesec.io verifies resource configuration according to Kubernetes security best-practices. As a result, you will have total control and additional suggestions for how to improve overall system security. The site also contains plenty of external links related to containers and Kubernetes security.
Link: https://kubesec.io
Cost: Free
Helpful CLI Tools
29. Cabin
Cabin functions as a mobile dashboard for the remote management of Kubernetes clusters. With Cabin, users can quickly manage applications, scale deployments, and troubleshoot overall K8s cluster from their Android or iOS device. Cabin is a great tool for operators of K8s clusters as it allows you to perform quick remediation actions in case of incidents.
Link: https://github.com/bitnami-labs/cabin
Cost: Free
30. Kubectx/Kubens
Kubectx is a small open-source utility tool which enhances Kubectl functionality with the possibility to switch context easily and connect to a few Kubernetes clusters at the same time. Kubens allows you to navigate between Kubernetes namespaces. Both tools have an auto-completion feature on bash/zsh/fish shells.
Link: https://github.com/ahmetb/kubectx
Cost: Free
31. Kube-shell
Kube-shell increases your productivity when working with kubectl. Kube-shell enables command auto-completion and auto-suggestion. Also, Kube-shell will provide in-line documentation about executed command. Kube-shell even can search and correct commands when wrongly typed. It’s a great tool to increase your performance and productivity in the K8s console.
Link: https://github.com/cloudnativelabs/kube-shell
Cost: Free
32. Kail
Kail is short for Kubernetes tail and works for Kubernetes clusters. With Kail, you can tail Docker logs for all matched pods. Kail allows you to filter pods by service, deployment, labels, and other features. Pods will be added (or removed) automatically to the log after a launch if it matches the criteria.
Link: https://github.com/boz/kail
Cost: Free
Development Tools
33. Telepresence
Telepresence provides the possibility to debug Kubernetes clusters locally by proxy data from your Kubernetes environment to the local process. Telepresence is able to provide access to Kubernetes services and AWS/GCP resources for your local code as it will be deployed to the cluster. With Telepresence, Kubernetes counts local code as a normal pod within your cluster.
Link: https://www.telepresence.io/
Cost: Free
34. Helm
Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes. It is like APT/Yum/Homebrew, but for Kubernetes. Helm operates with Char which is an archive set of Kubernetes resource manifests that make up a distributed application. You can share your application by creating a Helm chart. Helm allows you to create reproducible builds and manage Kubernetes manifests easily.
Link: https://github.com/kubernetes/helm
Cost: Free
35. Keel
Keel allows you to automate Kubernetes deployment updates and can be launched as a Kubernetes service in a dedicated namespace. With such organization, Keel introduces a minimal load on your environment and adds significant robustness. Keel helps to deploy Kubernetes service through labels, annotations, and charts. You just need to specify an update policy for each deployment or Helm release. Keel will automatically update your environment as soon as the new application version is available in the repository.
Link: https://keel.sh/
Cost: Free
36. Apollo
Apollo is an open source application providing teams with self-service UI for creating and deploying their services to Kubernetes. Apollo allows operators to view logs and revert deployments to any point in time with just one click. Apollo has flexible permission models for deployments. Each user can deploy only what he needs to deploy.
Link: https://github.com/logzio/apollo
Cost: Free
37. Draft
Draft is a tool provided by the Azure team that streamlines application development and deployment into any Kubernetes cluster. Draft creates “inner loops” between code deployment and code commits which significantly speed up the change verification process. With Draft, developers can prepare application Dockerfiles and Helm charts plus deploy applications to a remote or local Kubernetes cluster with two commands.
Link: https://github.com/azure/draft
Cost: Free
38. Deis Workflow
Deis Workflow is an open-source tool. The Platform as a Service (PaaS) creates additional layers of abstraction on top of Kubernetes clusters. These layers allow you to deploy and/or update Kubernetes applications without specific domain knowledge from developers. Workflow builds upon Kubernetes concepts to provide simple, developer-friendly app deployment. Delivered as a set of Kubernetes microservices, operators can easily install the platform. Workflow can deploy new versions of your app with zero downtime.
Link: https://deis.com/workflow/
Cost: Free
39. Kel
Kel is an open-source PaaS from Eldarion, Inc., which helps to manage Kubernetes applications through the entire lifecycle. Kel provides two additional layers written in Python and Go on top of Kubernetes. Level 0 allows you to provision Kubernetes resources, and Level 1 helps you to deploy any application on K8s.
Link: http://www.kelproject.com/
Cost: Free
Continuous Integration/ Continuous Delivery Pipeline
40. Cloud 66
A full DevOps toolchain for containerized apps in production, Cloud 66 automates much of the heavy-lifting for Devs through specialized Ops tools. The platform currently runs 4,000 customer workloads on Kubernetes and manages 2,500 lines of config. By offering end-to-end infrastructure management, Cloud 66 enables engineers to build, deliver, deploy, and manage any application on any cloud or server.
Link: www.cloud66.com
Cost: Free for 14 days
Serverless/Function Tools
41. Kubeless
Kubeless is a Kubernetes-native serverless framework that lets you deploy small bits of code without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure plumbing. Kubeless is aware of Kubernetes resources out-of-the-box and also provides auto-scaling, API routing, monitoring, and troubleshooting. Kubeless fully relies on K8s primitives, so Kubernetes users will also be able to use native K8s API servers and API gateways.
Link: https://github.com/kubeless/kubeless
Cost: Free
42. Fission
Fission is a fast serverless framework for Kubernetes with a focus on developer productivity and high performance. Fission works on a Kubernetes cluster anywhere: on your laptop, in any public cloud, or in a private data-center. You can write your function using Python, NodeJS, Go, C# or PHP, and deploy it on K8s clusters with Fission.
Link: https://fission.io/
Cost: Free
43. Funktion
For a long time, there was only one Function as a Service (FaaS) implementation available for Kubernetes: Funktion. Funktion is an open source event-driven lambda-style programming model designed for Kubernetes. Funktion is tightly coupled with the fabric8 platform. With Funktion, you can create flows to subscribe from over 200 event sources to invoke your function, including most databases, messaging systems, social media, and other middleware and protocols.
Link: https://github.com/funktionio/funktion
Cost: Free
44. IronFunction
IronFunctions is an open source serverless platform or FaaS platform that you can run anywhere. IronFunction is written on Golang and really supports functions in any language. The main advantage of IronFunction is that it supports the AWS Lambda format. Import functions directly from Lambda and run them wherever you want.
Link: https://github.com/iron-io/functions
Cost: Free
45. OpenWhisk
Apache OpenWhisk is a robust open source-FaaS platform driven by IBM and Adobe. OpenWhisk can be deployed on a local on-premise device or on the cloud. The design of Apache OpenWhisk means it acts as an asynchronous and loosely-coupled execution environment that can run functions against external triggers. OpenWhisk is available as SaaS solution on Bluemix, or you can deploy a Vagrant-based VM locally.
Link: https://console.bluemix.net/openwhisk/
Cost: Free
46. OpenFaaS
The OpenFaaS framework aims to manage serverless functions on Docker Swarm or Kubernetes where it will collect and analyze a wide range of metrics. You can package any process inside your function and use it without repetitive coding or any other routine action. FaaS has Prometheus metrics baked-in, which means it can automatically scale your functions up and down for demand. FaaS natively supports a web-based interface where you can try out your function.
Link: https://github.com/openfaas/faas
Cost: Free
47. Nuclio
Nuclio is a serverless project which aims to proceed with high-performance events and large amounts of data. Nuclio can be launched on an on-premise device as a standalone library or inside a VM/Docker container. Also, Nuclio supports Kubernetes out of the box. Nuclio provides real-time data processing with maximum parallelism and minimum overheads. You can try out Nuclio on the playground page.
Link: https://github.com/nuclio/nuclio
Cost: Free
48. Virtual-Kubelet
Virtual Kubelet is an open source Kubernetes Kubelet implementation that masquerades as a kubelet for the purposes of connecting Kubernetes to other APIs. Virtual Kubelet allows the nodes to be backed by other services like ACI, Hyper.sh, and AWS, etc. This connector features a pluggable architecture and direct use of Kubernetes primitives, making it much easier to build on.
Link: https://github.com/virtual-kubelet/virtual-kubelet
Cost: Free
49. Fnproject
Fnproject is a container native serverless project which supports practically any language and can run almost everywhere. Fn is written on Go, so it is performance-ready and lightweight. Fnproject supports AWS Lambda format style, so you can easily import your Lambda functions and launch it with Fnproject.
Link: http://fnproject.io/
Cost: Free
Native Service Discovery
50. CoreDNS
CoreDNS is a set of plugins written in Go which perform DNS functions. CoreDNS with additional Kubernetes plugins can replace the default Kube-DNS service and implement the specification defined for Kubernetes DNS-based service discovery. CoreDNS can also listen for DNS requests coming in over UDP/TCP, TLS, and gRPC.
Link: https://coredns.io/
Cost: Free
Native Visualization & Control
51. Kubernetes Dashboard
Kubernetes Dashboard is a general purpose, web-based UI for Kubernetes clusters. It is much easier to troubleshoot and monitor K8s clusters with a native dashboard. You need to create a secure proxy channel between your machine and Kubernetes API server to access the dashboard. The native Kubernetes dashboard relies on the Heapster data collector, so it also needs to be installed in the system.
Link: https://github.com/kubernetes/dashboard#kubernetes-dashboard
Cost: Free
And that's the complete list! As always, we’d love your feedback and suggestions for future articles. (Don't forget to check out our 50+ Useful Docker Tools too!)