Since Kubernetes alone doesn’t provide every feature necessary for managing a fully functional and secure production environment, several additional tools are typically required to address other concerns. This section contains a collection of useful projects and tools from the Kubernetes ecosystem.
Projects
This section provides details for selected open source projects, with a focus on CNCF ones. It doesn’t explore the complete feature sets of each project, but rather illustrates their key capabilities. New projects are added regularly to give you a broader vision of the Cloud Native ecosystem.
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Some items may reference my personal repo and temp credentials as I use them for demo during meetups and other tech events.
Tools
This section presents a non-exhaustive list of widely used tools organized by category like security, observability, or daily operations.
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Some of these tools are detailed in the Projects section above.
Daily Operations
Switch between Kubernetes contexts and namespaces easily
Shortcuts for common kubectl commands
Adds the current Kubernetes context and namespace to your shell prompt
Plugin manager for kubectl
Management Tools
Integrated Kubernetes IDE for observability and management
Terminal-based UI for cluster interaction
User-friendly Kubernetes UI focused on extensibility
Application Management & Packaging
Provides advanced deployment capabilities such as blue-green, canary,
Watches changes in ConfigMap and Secrets and trigger rolling upgrades
Based on its policy, finds pods that can be moved and evicts them
Package manager for Kubernetes applications
Networking
Reverse proxy and load balancer, supporting ingress routing, SSL termination, and more
Robust ingress controller, handling HTTP(S) traffic, SSL/TLS termination, and routing
Automatically manages DNS records in your DNS provider
Security
Policy enforcement for Kubernetes, allowing you to define and manage policies as code
Kyverno policies can validate, mutate, generate, and cleanup any Kubernetes resource
Checks if Kubernetes is deployed securely by running tests based on the CIS Benchmark
A vulnerability scanner for containers, Kubernetes, and other artifacts
Scanning Kubernetes YAML files to find security vulnerabilities, and misconfigurations
Runtime threat detection. It monitors system calls and alerts you to abnormal behaviors
Runtime Kubernetes security engine using eBPF and Linux Security Modules for securing workloads
Security platform that provides security coverage across the entire application lifecycle
Automates the issuance and renewal of TLS certificates enabling secure exposure of applications
Observability
Collection of components used to monitor a Kubernetes cluster
Visualizes metrics collected by Prometheus or other data sources, with rich dashboards
Distributed tracing for microservices
High-quality, ubiquitous, and portable telemetry to enable effective observability
GitOps Tools
Declarative, GitOps continuous delivery tool for Kubernetes
Set of continuous and progressive delivery solutions for Kubernetes that are open and extensible
Cost related tools
Provides real-time cost visibility and insights for teams using Kubernetes
Measuring and allocating cloud infrastructure and container costs in real time
Backup & Disaster Recovery
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The choice of tools should align with your specific requirements and use cases. Note that some tools are complementary, while others are direct competitors and should not be used together.