Top open-source Kubernetes management tools

Kubernetes has become a game-changing technology for container orchestration, and the vibrant open-source community has been a driving force behind its success. The curated selection of Kubernetes tooling presented here shows the breadth and depth of the ecosystem that has grown around Kubernetes.

From automation and monitoring to networking and security, these tools provide a solid foundation for managing containerized applications. The ongoing development of new open-source projects within the Kubernetes community is a testament to its vitality and innovation.

If you have spend countless hours working with Kubernetes, you understand the unique challenges of managing a complex infrastructure at scale. While Kubernetes is an incredibly powerful platform for deploying and managing containerized applications, it can also transform into a complex mess. So let's discover new tools to orchestrate your infrastructure!

Deployment and configuration management

Kustomize

Kustomize is a tool that lets you customize Kubernetes resources by applying patches to base configurations. It provides a simple and declarative way to manage your Kubernetes configurations, allowing you to manage different environments and configurations with ease.
👉 Kustomize’s GitHub

Jsonnet

Jsonnet is a configuration language that can be used to generate Kubernetes manifests. It provides a clear way to define Kubernetes resources using a flexible and expressive syntax, which can be used to manage complex and large configurations.
👉 Jsonnet's GitHub

Skaffold

Skaffold is a command-line tool that streamlines the development workflow for Kubernetes applications. It supports many popular programming languages and development tools, and can be integrated with CI/CD pipelines.
👉 Skaffold's GitHub

Helm

Helm is the well-known package manager for Kubernetes that simplifies the installation and management of complex applications. It provides a templating system that allows you to define your applications as charts, which can be effortlessly installed and configured on your Kubernetes cluster.
You can also read more on our blog post about Helm.
👉 Helm's GitHub

Kubeconfig-generator

Kubeconfig-generator is a tool for generating Kubernetes configuration files (kubeconfig) for multiple clusters and users. With Kubeconfig-generator, you can simplify the process of managing multiple clusters and users by generating configuration files automatically. It supports many popular Kubernetes distributions and can be integrated with CI/CD pipelines.
👉 Kubeconfig-generator's Github

Monitoring and observability

Prometheus

Prometheus is a monitoring tool that collects metrics from Kubernetes resources and stores them in a time-series database—it is a powerful way to monitor the health and performance of your Kubernetes cluster and applications.
👉 Prometheus's GitHub

Thanos

Thanos is a tool that extends Prometheus by adding long-term storage, global querying, and cross-cluster federation capabilities to store your Kubernetes metrics over a long period of time.
👉 Thano's GitHub

Grafana

Grafana is a visualization tool that can be used with Prometheus to create dashboards and visualizations of your Kubernetes metrics, making it smoother to understand the health and performance of your applications.
👉 Grafana's GitHub

Kubevisor

Kubevisor is a lightweight and extensible Kubernetes resource monitor that provides real-time insights into the health and performance infrastructure. You can visualize resource usage and metrics, set alerts and thresholds, and troubleshoot issues quickly. Kubevisor supports many popular Kubernetes distributions and can be integrated with Prometheus and Grafana.
👉 Kubevisor's GitHub

Sysdig

Sysdig unifies visibility, security, and compliance for Kubernetes and other cloud-native technologies. It allows you to monitor your Kubernetes infrastructure and applications in real-time, detect security threats and vulnerabilities, and enforce compliance policies. Sysdig provides a set of features for monitoring and observability, including container visibility, network security, and compliance auditing.
👉 Sysdig's GitHub

Logging and tracing

Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch is a search engine that can be used to store and search logs generated by Kubernetes resources. It simplifies the management and search of logs in Kubernetes to troubleshoot issues in your applications.
👉 Elasticsearch's GitHub

Fluentd

Fluentd is a data collection tool that can collect logs and send them to Elasticsearch or other destinations.
👉 Fluentd's GitHub

Jaeger

Jaeger is a distributed tracing system that can be used to monitor the performance of your Kubernetes applications by tracing requests through your Kubernetes cluster, making it easy to identify performance bottlenecks and troubleshoot issues.
👉 Jaeger's GitHub

OpenTelemetry

OpenTelemetry provides a vendor-neutral and language-agnostic way to collect, process, and export telemetry data to collect logs, traces, and metrics from your applications and infrastructure, and export them to popular observability platforms such as Prometheus and Grafana. 👉 OpenTelemetry's GitHub

Fluent Bit

Fluent Bit is a lightweight and high-performance log and event collector that supports many popular logging systems and formats. With Fluent Bit, you can collect and process logs from your Kubernetes applications and infrastructure, and export them to popular logging platforms such as Elasticsearch and Splunk.
👉 Fluent Bit's GitHub

Networking and service discovery

CoreDNS

CoreDNS is a DNS server that can be used to provide service discovery within your Kubernetes cluster to manage DNS records for your Kubernetes resources, making it easy to discover and communicate with services within your cluster.
👉 CoreDNS's GitHub

Traefik

Traefik is a reverse proxy and load balancer that can be used to manage network traffic between Kubernetes resources to manage network traffic and enforce security policies to secure and optimize communication between your Kubernetes resources.
👉 Traefik's GitHub

Istio

Istio is a service mesh that can be used to manage and secure communication between services within your Kubernetes cluster to manage traffic routing, load balancing, and security policies.
👉 Istio's GitHub

Contour

Contour is a Kubernetes ingress controller that provides a high-performance and scalable way to manage incoming traffic. Contour supports many popular features, such as TLS termination, load balancing, and path-based routing.
👉 Contour's GitHub

Security

Kubernetes Secrets

Kubernetes Secrets is a tool that can be used to store and manage sensitive information like passwords and API keys. It provides a simple and secure way to manage secrets within your Kubernetes cluster to protect sensitive information.
👉 Kubernetes Secrets's GitHub

RBAC (Role-Based Access Control)

RBAC is a security mechanism that can be used to control access to Kubernetes resources based on roles and permissions to manage access control within your Kubernetes cluster, making it easy to enforce security policies.
👉 RBAC's GitHub

Open Policy Agent (OPA)

OPA is a policy engine that can be used to enforce security policies and access control within your Kubernetes cluster to define policies, which can be used to enforce security and compliance requirements.
👉 OPA's GitHub

Kyverno

Kyverno is a policy engine designed for Kubernetes to ensure compliance and security for your Kubernetes infrastructure and applications. Kyverno is easy to deploy and configure and provides a powerful set of features for policy enforcement.
👉 Kyverno's GitHub

Gatekeeper

Gatekeeper is a policy engine designed for Kubernetes. It provides a way to enforce policies and rules for Kubernetes resources using the Open Policy Agent (OPA) engine. With Gatekeeper, you can ensure compliance and security for your Kubernetes infrastructure and applications.
👉 Gatekeeper's GitHub

Continuous integration/Continuous deployment

Dagger

Dagger is a Kubernetes-native deployment tool that simplifies the deployment and management of applications on Kubernetes. With Dagger, you can define and deploy complex applications in minutes, without the need for complex YAML files or custom scripts. It provides a simple and intuitive user interface for managing deployments, with real-time monitoring and logging.
👉 Dagger's GitHub

Jenkins

Jenkins is a popular CI/CD tool that can be used to automate the process of building, testing, and deploying your applications to Kubernetes. It provides a simple and flexible way to define pipelines, which can be used to automate the entire software delivery process.
👉 Jenkins's GitHub

GitLab

GitLab is a platform that provides CI/CD pipelines for building, testing, and deploying your applications to Kubernetes. It provides a simple and powerful way to manage your source code and automate the software delivery process.
👉 GitLab's GitHub

Argo CD

Argo CD is a tool that can be used to automate the deployment of your applications to Kubernetes by using GitOps principles. It provides a simple and powerful way to manage the deployment of your applications, making it easy to ensure consistency and reliability.
👉 Argo CD's GitHub

Tekton

Tekton is an open source framework for building CI/CD pipelines on Kubernetes to define and execute pipelines using Kubernetes resources. Tekton is gaining popularity as more organizations adopt Kubernetes for CI/CD.
👉 Tekton's GitHub

Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC)

Terraform

Terraform is a tool that can be used to define and manage your Kubernetes infrastructure as code, making it easy to provision and manage your Kubernetes cluster and associated resources.
Learn how to deploy your Terraform module in a few click with our guided hands-on here.
👉 Terraform's GitHub

Ansible

Ansible is a tool that can be used to automate the provisioning and configuration of your Kubernetes resources. It provides a simple and powerful way to manage your infrastructure, making deploying and managing your Kubernetes resources easy.
👉 Ansible's GitHub

Pulumi

Pulumi is a tool that can be used to create and manage your Kubernetes resources using familiar programming languages like Python and JavaScript.
👉 Pulumi's GitHub

Crossplane

Crossplane is an open source platform for managing cloud-native infrastructure that helps to manage infrastructure across multiple clouds. Crossplane is gaining popularity as more organizations adopt multi-cloud strategies.
👉 Crossplane's GitHub

Final thoughts

The momentum Kubernetes has right now is driving so many positive things. Every vendor is taking a Kubernetes-first approach to building their solutions and tools. For example, modern applications are being built and packaged to run on Kubernetes, and most innovations in areas like security and development are being built around Kubernetes. As well as this, every major cloud offers its own Kubernetes services. The ecosystem is huge, it’s still growing, and it’s very welcoming. That last bit is helping lower the entry barrier and allowing more people to enter.

As Kubernetes continues to evolve, we can expect even more exciting developments and advancements to emerge. It's an exciting time to be part of the Kubernetes community, and we look forward to seeing the new tools and solutions that will be developed in the future.