For this Thanksgiving, we asked the Kubernetes community about their favourite and most used tools for managing Kubernetes. 221k views and 152 comments later, these are the tools Kubernetes users swear by because they solve real problems and make daily tasks smoother, more efficient, and even more fun!
Whether it’s cutting costs, improving visibility into your clusters, or boosting security, these tools have become important for DevOps teams, developers, and anyone working with Kubernetes.
And the results are in!
We’ve organized these tools into categories such as cost savings, CI/CD, monitoring, security, and cluster management. Let’s get started!
Kubernetes Cost Optimization Tools
PerfectScale
The community was full of praise for PerfectScale’s ability to handle cost optimization automatically and effectively and reduce unnecessary expenses in their Kubernetes environments. Users loved how it uses machine learning algorithms and dynamically right-sizes Kubernetes resources based on workload demand, preventing over-provisioning and ensuring that the infrastructure is always aligned with the actual needs of the workloads. The platform offers scaling and a self-healing mechanism to adjust resource provisioning in real-time, minimizing waste and improving operational efficiency.
What makes PerfectScale actionable is its ability to integrate with cloud-native infrastructure seamlessly. The tool autonomously analyzes workload behavior and adjusts the scaling rules to optimize resources dynamically. This automated approach removes the manual overhead of fine-tuning Kubernetes resource allocations and ensures cost efficiency while maintaining performance and availability. PerfectScale also supports multi-cloud environments, allowing for flexibility across various cloud providers, including AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure.
For teams looking to optimize both cost and resilience, PerfectScale provides insights into how workloads are consuming resources and allows fine-tuning for a balance between performance and cost savings. Its proactive scaling ensures workloads are always right-sized based on real-time usage, reducing unnecessary cloud costs. PerfectScale’s detailed reporting and actionable recommendations make it a valuable asset for DevOps teams looking to maintain a cost-efficient Kubernetes environment. Sign up and Book a Demo to see PerfectScale in action.
Kubecost
Kubecost was another community favorite for demystifying cloud spend in Kubernetes. Users loved how it breaks down costs by namespace, service, and even deployment, helping teams identify areas of waste and optimize their resources more effectively. It provides teams with detailed insights into how their Kubernetes resources are being utilized and how much they are spending. The platform can integrate with Kubernetes’ native metrics, making it easy to track resource utilization and cost across all cloud environments, including multi-cloud deployments.
Kubecost gives users a clear understanding of their actual cloud bill as it reconciles with Kubernetes resource consumption. Its dashboard provides a granular view, allowing teams to drill down into specific namespaces, deployments, or services to gain insights into where costs are accumulating and identify areas for optimization. For further details, refer to the Kubecost documentation
Karpenter
Karpenter is a Kubernetes-native autoscaler designed to improve resource utilization and reduce costs by enabling dynamic scaling. The community loved how it seamlessly integrates with tools like AWS EKS and provisions nodes on-demand to match workload requirements. Instead of relying on static node groups or manually configured instance types, Karpenter dynamically provisions and deprovisions compute resources based on real-time workload demands. This makes it an ideal tool for environments where workloads vary significantly, helping to minimize idle resources and prevent over-provisioning. By directly interacting with cloud provider APIs, such as AWS EC2, Karpenter allows Kubernetes clusters to adapt to workload changes with speed and efficiency. It’s effective in cost-efficient Spot Instances while maintaining workload reliability through fallback strategies.
One of Karpenter's great abilities is to complement or work together with tools like PerfectScale by focusing on real-time adjustments. While PerfectScale fine-tunes workloads to optimize resource consumption, Karpenter ensures that the underlying nodes are provisioned dynamically to match those optimized workloads. It supports a wide range of configurations, including custom instance selection, GPU requirements, and taints and tolerations for scheduling specialized workloads. It dynamically scales both Spot and On-Demand Instances to achieve significant cost savings without compromising performance. To learn more about it, refer to the docs.
>> Take at look at Karpenter: The ultimate Guide
Kubernetes Tools for CI/CD
Argo CD
Argo CD is a GitOps-centric continuous delivery tool built for Kubernetes, and the community can’t stop raving about its declarative approach to continuous delivery. People loved its ability to keep applications in sync with Git repositories while providing seamless rollbacks. A standout feature of Argo CD is its multi-tenancy support, which makes easier access control and secure environment segregation, making it ideal for large organizations with complex deployments.
Argo CD’s integration with tools like Helm, Kustomize, and Jsonnet enables developers to deploy applications using the methods they prefer while maintaining compatibility with Kubernetes. It supports progressive delivery techniques such as canary and blue-green deployments, allowing updates to be rolled out incrementally in Argo CD with minimal risk. It provides advanced capabilities like ApplicationSets making it easy to manage multiple applications that share common parameters, reducing duplication and simplifying scalability. Its user-friendly CLI, API, and web UI provide extensive observability and management options. To learn more about Argo CD and how it can help you, check Argo CD documentation.
Flux
The community loves Flux for its lightweight yet powerful automation capabilities. It is another leading GitOps tool for Kubernetes that focuses on lightweight, automated deployment workflows. It continuously monitors Git repositories or container registries for changes and applies them to Kubernetes clusters. Flux provides modularity, letting teams enable only the features they need, such as Helm automation, image scanning, or Kustomize overlays. Its support for secret management tools like AWS Secrets Manager and HashiCorp Vault enhances security for sensitive configuration data.
What sets Flux apart is its efficiency and multi-tenancy support. Teams can manage deployments for multiple environments, such as development, staging, and production, from a single source of truth in Git. This approach minimizes configuration drift and simplifies auditing. Flux’s Helm controller automates the lifecycle of Helm chart releases, reducing manual overhead for Helm-based workflows. Wants to get start with Flux, Have a look at Flux's docs
Tekton
Tekton’s flexibility in CI/CD pipelines made it a standout. Users loved its YAML-based configuration for building workflows tailored to their specific needs. Unlike predefined workflows, Tekton provides foundational building blocks like tasks, pipelines, and triggers, allowing teams to construct workflows that meet their specific requirements. This flexibility makes Tekton an excellent choice for organizations with unique or complex CI/CD needs.
Tekton’s pipelines are declared as YAML manifests, enabling teams to version-control their CI/CD logic alongside application code. Tasks can be shared and reused across pipelines, providing consistency and reducing redundancy. Its event-driven automation allows pipelines to trigger in response to changes in Git repositories or other system events. Its growing ecosystem, including Tekton Chains for securing software supply chains and Tekton Hub for sharing tasks, expands its utility. Want to learn more about it? Check the Tekton documentation.
Kubernetes Monitoring Tools
Prometheus + Grafana
This combo is a classic for a reason, and the community couldn’t agree more. Prometheus and Grafana are important observability stacks for the Kubernetes environment. Prometheus is an open-source monitoring tool designed to collect metrics from Kubernetes clusters, providing detailed insight into resource utilization, performance, and system health. It uses a time-series database to store metrics, supports query languages like PromQL, and scrapes metrics directly from the cluster. Prometheus also enables users to set up customizable alerts using Alertmanager, making it easy to detect and respond in real-time.
Grafana provides a visualization platform that transforms raw metrics into dashboards. Grafana integrates with Prometheus and other data sources, allowing teams to monitor multiple systems from a single interface. Its flexible templating features enable dynamic, reusable dashboards that adapt to different clusters or environments.
What makes this stack actionable is its ability to support proactive monitoring. Teams can configure threshold-based alerts that trigger notifications via email, Slack, or PagerDuty when critical issues arise. Grafana's dashboards can also be tailored or designed to specific use cases, such as SLO monitoring, capacity planning, or troubleshooting application performance. By using Prometheus and Grafana together, teams gain a comprehensive toolkit to keep their Kubernetes environments healthy and performant. To learn more about Prometheus and Grafana, check out Prometheus website and Grafana website.
OpenTelemetry
OpenTelemetry stood out for standardizing observability across metrics, logs, and traces. Users appreciated its vendor-neutral approach(enables developers to instrument applications and infrastructure without being tied to a specific backend) and its focus on distributed tracing, which is essential for debugging microservices. Its support for various data formats and protocols, such as OpenMetrics and Jaeger, makes it a versatile choice for Kubernetes environments. By tracing requests as they propagate through a system, it helps teams identify bottlenecks, latency spikes, or dependencies that affect performance.
To make OpenTelemetry actionable, teams can integrate it with observability backends like Grafana Tempo, Prometheus, or Elastic Observability. These integrations allow for the centralized analysis of telemetry data, providing actionable insights into system behavior. For more information, visit the OpenTelemetry documentation.
Loki
Loki is a favorite open-source for cost-effective log aggregation mainly for the Kubernetes environment. The community loved how it focuses on indexing metadata rather than full logs, keeping it lightweight and scalable. Loki can integrate with Prometheus, reusing its labels (such as pod names, namespaces, and node identifiers) to correlate logs with metrics.
Loki’s architecture is designed for simplicity and Kubernetes-native workflows. It supports log ingestion from multiple sources, including Fluentd, Promtail, and Fluent Bit, making it easy to collect logs from pods and containers. The logs can be queried using the PromQL-like LogQL language, enabling teams to filter, search, and analyze logs efficiently. For more information, refer to the Loki documentation
Kubernetes Security Tools
Trivy
Trivy’s speed and simplicity won over the community. Users loved how it scans for vulnerabilities across images, Kubernetes manifests, and IaC, integrating easily into existing pipelines, making it a popular choice for teams aiming to enhance security in their development pipelines. By scanning container images for Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs), it ensures that only secure images are deployed to Kubernetes clusters.
Trivy's support for scanning Kubernetes YAML files helps detect misconfigurations such as overly permissive roles or insecure network policies. Its ability to integrate into CI/CD pipelines, including Jenkins, GitHub Actions, or GitLab CI, automates security checks early in the development lifecycle. Check out Trivy’s Docs
Kyverno
Kyverno is a Kubernetes-native policy engine designed to manage and enforce security and operational policies. The community appreciated how it uses YAML for defining policies, making it accessible to teams already familiar with Kubernetes manifests. Kyverno supports various policy types, including validation, mutation, and generation policies. Validation policies ensure resources comply with security standards, mutation policies automatically modify resources to align with best practices, and generation policies create additional resources, such as ConfigMaps or Secrets, during deployment.
It can integrate with Kubernetes Admission Controllers, enabling real-time policy enforcement. For example, it can enforce image scanning policies by ensuring only trusted container images are deployed or require resource requests and limits for all Pods to prevent resource contention. With native support for audit logs and detailed policy violation reporting, Kyverno makes compliance tracking straightforward. It is also compatible with Kubernetes Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs), ensuring that policies extend to custom workloads. You can explore it more in the Kyverno docs.
Kubescape
Kubescape is an open-source Kubernetes security platform that helps in assessing and enforcing compliance with best practices and security standards. Kubescape provides automated scans of Kubernetes clusters, workloads, and configurations, identifying vulnerabilities and misconfigurations. Users loved its support for security frameworks like CIS Kubernetes Benchmark, NSA-CISA guidelines, and MITRE ATT&CK® aiming to secure the Kubernetes environments.
Kubescape’s actionable insights set it apart. The tool highlights critical vulnerabilities and provides remediation guidance. Its integration with CI/CD pipelines allows teams to identify and resolve misconfigurations early in the development lifecycle. Also, Kubescape visualizes the attack surface by mapping vulnerabilities to Kubernetes objects and namespaces. With built-in support for RBAC analysis, it ensures least-privilege access policies are enforced, reducing the risk of insider threats. To dive deeper, check the docs
Kubernetes Application Management Tools
Helm
Helm, commonly referred to as the Kubernetes package manager, simplifies the deployment, scaling, and management of Kubernetes applications through the use of charts. Charts are reusable templates that encapsulate Kubernetes resources such as Pods, Services, and ConfigMaps, enabling developers to package and share entire application configurations. The community loves Helm for its simplicity and versatility. Developers appreciate its seamless integration with CI/CD pipelines, allowing for rapid, reliable deployments. Its declarative approach allows teams to specify desired application states and manage rollbacks with ease.
Helm provides advanced features like dependency management, which allows you to define and manage interdependent components in an application stack. For example, a Helm chart for a web application can include dependencies on backend databases or caching layers, ensuring the entire stack is deployed cohesively. By using Helm's extensive chart repositories, organizations can quickly adopt pre-configured solutions or build custom charts for internal use. To learn more about Helm, see here
Kustomize
Kustomize has earned praise for its clean and declarative approach to managing Kubernetes configurations. Kustomize is a configuration management tool that enables you to customize Kubernetes manifests without using templating. Instead of modifying base YAML files directly, Kustomize applies overlays that introduce environment-specific configurations, such as different resource limits or environment variables. This approach keeps your base manifests clean and reusable.
Kustomize is especially valuable in GitOps workflows because it allows for declarative and version-controlled application configurations. Its patches feature makes it easy to override specific fields in base manifests without duplicating the entire file. For example, you can define one set of base manifests for a microservice and use overlays to adjust parameters for development, staging, and production environments. To learn more about it, visit the Kustomize documentation.
Skaffold
Skaffold makes efficient the Kubernetes development workflow by automating the build-push-deploy cycle. It is useful for iterative development, as it handles tasks like building container images, pushing them to a registry, and deploying updates to a Kubernetes cluster. With Skaffold, developers can focus on coding while the tool manages infrastructure changes in the background.
The community praises Skaffold for its live reload feature, which watches for changes in your codebase and automatically updates running deployments. This is invaluable for microservices development, where frequent iterations are the standard. Skaffold supports multiple build systems, such as Docker and Buildpacks, and can deploy applications using Helm, Kustomize, or raw Kubernetes manifests. For CI/CD pipelines, it can easily integrate with GitLab, Jenkins, and GitHub Actions, ensuring that development practices align with production workflows. For more information, check out the docs
Kubernetes Cluster Management and Visualization Tools
K9s
If you prefer working from the terminal, K9s is a must-have. The community gushed about its fast, lightweight, and interactive interface to navigate and manage Kubernetes resources. It is designed for developers and operators who prefer working from the command line. With K9s, users can view the state of clusters in real-time, making it an essential tool for debugging and troubleshooting. Its key bindings and context-aware navigation significantly reduce the time spent typing complex kubectl commands, improving productivity for CLI-focused workflows.
One of the standout features of K9s is its ability to monitor resources dynamically, displaying live updates for Pods, Deployments, ConfigMaps, and more. For example, users can inspect logs, view container details, and even restart Pods directly from the terminal. K9s also supports custom resource definitions (CRDs), making it versatile for specialized Kubernetes setups. Want to explore its more capabilities? See the K9s GitHub repository.
Lens
Lens is a Kubernetes Integrated Development Environment (IDE) designed to simplify cluster management through a graphical user interface (GUI). People loved its centralized dashboard for cluster management and built-in support for Helm charts. From dashboards, users can view resource statuses, analyze metrics, and perform actions like scaling Deployments or restarting Pods with just a few clicks. It supports any CNCF-certified Kubernetes cluster, including on-prem and cloud-managed services.
Lens includes advanced monitoring capabilities powered by Prometheus, providing real-time insights into cluster performance and resource utilization. Developers can inspect container logs, debug applications, and execute shell commands inside containers without switching between tools. Its support for managing Helm charts allows teams to deploy, upgrade, and rollback applications seamlessly. To learn more about its features, check the Lens docs.
Octant
Octant is an open-source, web-based tool focused on providing deep insights into Kubernetes applications and their configurations. It empowers developers and operators to explore cluster resources visually, identify misconfigurations, and debug issues interactively. Octant's plugin-based architecture allows teams to extend its functionality, making it a highly customizable tool for Kubernetes environments.
The community loved its automatic generation of dependency diagrams, which simplify debugging and understanding complex workloads. For example, it automatically generates diagrams showing how Pods, Services, and Ingress controllers interact, which is invaluable for understanding application architecture. Users can inspect YAML manifests, view detailed logs, and analyze events directly through its web interface. Check the Octant docs for more details.
This Thanksgiving, these tools are the ones that the Kubernetes community really appreciates. They help solve real problems, boost productivity, and make the complex world of Kubernetes much easier to handle. Whether you’re saving costs with PerfectScale, managing deployments with Argo CD, or getting insights through Prometheus and Grafana, there’s something for everyone.
As you check out these tools, take a moment to appreciate all the hard work the community has put into making Kubernetes better for everyone. Happy Thanksgiving, and may your clusters run smoothly!
