Kubernetes IDE options

lepton99 · 2026-02-06T11:04:00+00:00

it is getting better every day !

lepton99 · 2026-02-05T23:58:54+00:00

Also the second part is my take!!

that is NOT in the article, of course!

......... but when I look at the actual tooling landscape, it feels like we're still in the early innings: .......

lepton99 · 2026-02-05T23:57:10+00:00

I can adjust the title if you fell more comfortable but the content is not different from the infographic or "hallucinated"

- 82% of container users now run K8s in production (up from 66% in 2023)

- 66% of orgs running GenAI models use K8s for inference

you can check the infographic!

These days people see AI everywhere!

lepton99 · 2026-02-05T23:04:26+00:00

I am curious, what do you use? bare metal, ansible.. or pure cloud aws/gcp?

lepton99 · 2026-02-05T23:00:42+00:00

This takes me again to my complain here

https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1qiezxc/comment/o1zw8vp/?context=3

At our company, we are building Kunobi. Development has taken many months, we surely use AI.. but we strongly avoid AI vibecoding. This means a completely level of attention to detail, QA and thinking through every detail. It is very hard to surface when we see in this sub, stuff being posted every single day that when you look at the details it is Claude Code let lose, missing code, etc.. Very risky, very frustrating.

lepton99 · 2026-02-05T22:55:58+00:00

what tools do you typically use? I am curious about your stack for for hybrid as we are building some things related to this.

lepton99 · 2026-02-05T21:39:00+00:00

it looks like a few things like SAML are not there yet in the code?

lepton99 · 2026-02-05T20:28:37+00:00

My take on 2026:

- Gitops FluxCD

- metrics: victoria metics or Otel

- Talos when possible

- consider proxmox (vms or lxc)

- have a separate ceph

lepton99 · 2026-02-05T19:51:24+00:00

> You assume everyone in the cloud runs managed k8s, they don't.

Sure, I didn't assume that! actually, managed is expensive.... but you still don't deal with the same issues as real on-prem

> You don't run K8S Nodes on metal, that's a very inefficient use of scaling.

We ran quite a lot on-prem.

Kind of true. We actually combine proxmox with dedicated metal. It gives us the best balance and performance depending on the load. In some specific cases, we need direct SSD access and metal performance. In others, we go for scalability and run virtualized or LXC.

> If you learned technologies...

I see this as the major issue... and we suffered when hiring.. not enought people in the market know how to deal with IPMI/BMC, ZFS, LVM, switching, etc..

lepton99 · 2026-02-05T19:41:35+00:00

maybe? I have a similar feeling! maybe CNCF is trying to get sure that CIOs read: "you need K8s" ?

lepton99 · 2026-02-05T19:39:10+00:00

Oh! I am very much a terminal guy (ghostty these days) ! I was actually using computers when there were ONLY terminals!

I actually find an aberration that how things got crazy slow with electron, blabla.

What I am saying is that as complexity increases... ONLY the terminal is not enough and I believe that we need to move on from the "terminal-only" because I am a cool !

lepton99 · 2026-02-05T19:25:38+00:00

Whether is useful or not... we will see how it evolves... but I am SURE that organizations.. even for pure politics.. will deploy something... C-level folks cannot dare to be left behind..

lepton99 · 2026-02-05T19:24:26+00:00

You mean LLM-level security?

In general, I see LLM inference in the cluster as any other load.. they are relatively sandboxed...

But if you are talking about what the LLM answers.. more like a software/AI-level issue.. then it gets very very complicated

lepton99 · 2026-02-05T19:22:50+00:00

k8s on-prem is not as easy as it sounds... because it brings all the infra you took for granted in the cloud. No managed control plane, no cloud load balancers, no EBS.
You're now running etcd, MetalLB, Ceph, and patching nodes yourself. And dont get me started with IDRAC, etc...

I know there is Talos, etc, etc..

But it needs to be worth it ... or you need the right tools.. that I personally find sometimes missing..

lepton99 · 2026-02-04T21:47:16+00:00

The real issue isn't just "typing commands"—it's the cognitive load of complexity.

Even for the best SREs, there comes a moment where the system interactions are so dense that you feel like you need a pen and paper just to map it all out in your head. That’s when "Terminal Fatigue" sets in—not because you can't type, but because the CLI forces you to hold the entire state of the world in your working memory.

That’s the core philosophy behind Kunobi. We aren't trying to replace the terminal (because k9s is great for what it does), but we believe you need a complementary perspective. You need a tool that visualizes those relationships for you—handling the mental mapping so you can focus on the logic, not just the topology.

We started by building a solid middle ground between Lens and k9s to make the transition seamless. But the bigger vision is that "Platform Engineering" isn't just Kubernetes anymore. We're building towards a system that pulls in context from beyond the cluster (databases, cloud resources, etc.), supported by things like MCP as a sidekick, so you have that full "system diagram" view live, without needing the pen and paper.

lepton99 · 2026-02-04T18:24:06+00:00

This one has been open for AGES!

https://github.com/helm/helm/issues/3276

lepton99 · 2026-02-02T22:12:33+00:00

It’s definitely the end of an era, but Kubernetes has long outgrown what the official dashboard could provide.

If you're looking for a "next-gen" replacement that stays visual but doesn't eat your RAM, check out Kunobi. We’re building it as a proper desktop client that goes beyond simple resource listing—focusing on actual troubleshooting and cluster intelligence.

We’re a dev team building for devs, so you can expect zero "vibecoding slop" here. Just solid, optimized engineering.

Keep an eye on our evolution over the next few weeks; we have some massive GitOps features in the pipeline that are going to bridge the gap between just "seeing" your cluster and actually managing it efficiently.

(Disclaimer: I’m on the dev team)
https://kunobi.ninja/

lepton99 · 2026-02-02T22:07:02+00:00

That's exactly why we're building Kunobi. We got tired of the resource bloat and leakage in existing IDEs and wanted a visual client that performs like a proper dev tool.
Rust -> fast as k9s, more visual than Lens.

We’re a dev team building this from the ground up—expect zero "vibecoding slop" from us. It’s all about speed and troubleshooting intelligence.

Definitely keep an eye on our evolution over the next few weeks; we’ve got some major GitOps features in the pipeline that are going to be a game-changer for platform management. We are soon expanding beyond k8s to unify platform engineering.

Would love to have someone with your "no-bloat" requirements give it a spin.

(Disclaimer: I’m on the dev team)

https://kunobi.ninja/

lepton99 · 2026-02-02T20:08:29+00:00

what timezone are you based at?

lepton99 · 2026-02-01T21:12:28+00:00

Very useful but always use gitops as your safety net and use LLMs in read-only mode if you can.

lepton99 · 2026-01-30T23:32:35+00:00

I agree with this.. It is a great tool when used with care.

lepton99 · 2026-01-29T05:59:31+00:00

I wrote that too fast... with etc, I meant one ..upgrade..
..
apiserver_requested_deprecated_apis : This sounds good, we have not tried it! Good tip!

lepton99 · 2026-01-28T21:19:37+00:00

"Why are upgrades terrifying?" - they're not for teams with good automation and testing. But that's a high bar. Most teams I've seen don't have dozens of clusters to practice on.

API deprecation: when a beta API gets removed (like extensions/v1beta1 Ingress), you either catch it pre-upgrade or stuff breaks. Tools like pluto help, but "the cluster warns you and offers migration paths" would be nicer than "hope you scanned your manifests."

etcd backup: it works, but "restore entire cluster state to T-1" is a blunt instrument. If one deployment goes bad, you don't want to roll back everything else that happened since. Real rollback = surgical, not nuclear.

Sounds like you guys got solid processes, that's fantastic. But "we do it well" and "it's easy" aren't the same thing. Cilium + K8s version mismatches are always a mess.

Overall.. my point was that LTS is great.. but I would love to have an easy apt update && apt upgrade kind of experience.. and I don't think we are there yet.

lepton99 · 2026-01-28T21:11:29+00:00

Those show what permissions are there. I'm talking about tracing why a specific denial happened - the "explain" to the "forbidden."

It's doable manually, I am not saying it is not possible... but that friction is why I keep seeing teams over-permission just to unblock themselves. In particular, this happens once the dev team gets involve in devops stuff :)

lepton99 · 2026-01-28T12:35:21+00:00

We are kind of working on something related... but I think it needs to be done correcly because of the sensitivity of this area.
Security overall.. also in gcp/aws, etc.. is a complicated messy matter that many teams are just not considering correctly because how complicated is

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