Your Kubernetes cluster as an explorable world map.
Instead of scrolling tables of pods and nodes, you look at a map. Each node is a patch of terrain coloured by its health, each workload is a city sited on the node its pods run on, and the problems that need you surface in a queue — the next thing needing your attention — rather than buried in dashboards.
Table and dashboard tools hide two things a map makes obvious: where things run, and what matters right now. KuberNation is built around four ideas.
Resources project onto a stable world. A node's terrain is its health; a workload's city moves when its pods reschedule; two clusters sit side by side so drift is visible at a glance.
Crash loops, stalled rollouts, pending volumes, nodes under pressure, burning error budgets — aggregated and ranked into one queue. Press N to fly to the next problem.
It observes by default. Every change is explicit, confirmed, RBAC-checked, and server-side dry-run validated — and all the write code lives in one small, auditable file.
Consult a local or corporate LLM to explain a workload or the whole realm — from a redacted, fenced summary, never raw dumps or Secrets. The model proposes; you and the gate dispose.
Everything on screen is a real Kubernetes object you could kubectl get —
the game words are just a lens.
Drill-downs
Click a city to open the workload in full; click open land for the node. Both are classic 4X-style screens reframed for Kubernetes.
Map views
The View menu recolours the whole world like a strategy game's map modes, so a different question gets a different map.
Triage
Three axes answer an incident, and each has a home.
B) — the dependency fan-out across the map, with a clickable impact list (honest topology, never invented edges).H) — a classified change-feed with a "trouble begins here" fault line, plus a one-click after-action report.
Advisors & cost
Seven advisor tabs roll up the cluster as pure functions of what's observed.
$/mo with your rates, or invoice-grade via OpenCost.
Security & posture
A small security suite, all read-only and all reusing what KuberNation already watches.
can-i grid of what you can do here, dangerous capabilities flagged. It kills surprise 403s.
Game Day
A chaos-engineering console: inject a real, confirmed, RBAC-gated failure and watch the cluster respond — the queue lights up, the blast radius spreads, the budget spends.
Consult a language model you bring to explain a workload, a node, or the whole realm. Advisory, private by construction, and it can never touch the cluster on its own.
Every shape on the map is a live Kubernetes object.
| Kubernetes | On the map |
|---|---|
| Zone / failure domain | a continent — nodes in the same zone cluster together |
| Node | a province of terrain, coloured by health |
| Workload (Deployment, StatefulSet) | a city, sited where its pods run — it moves when they do |
| Pod | a citizen of its city / garrison of its node |
| DaemonSet | a road, paved across every node it runs on |
| Service / Ingress | a harbor / gate on the city's coast |
| PersistentVolumeClaim | a granary inland of the city |
| Job / CronJob / custom resource | structures on the namespace islands |
| A problem | a ranked attention-queue entry + a flag on the map |
KuberNation is an operator-laptop tool. It talks to your cluster through your kubeconfig and runs no in-cluster agent. The whole write surface is one auditable file; there is deliberately no exec/shell, and Secret contents are never surfaced. The only call KuberNation makes to a third-party endpoint is the optional Oracle — opt-in, off by default for remote, and gated like everything else (OpenCost, if used, is read through your existing cluster connection).
Pre-built binaries are attached to every
GitHub release.
Download, verify against SHA256SUMS, and run it against your current
kube-context. From source: cargo run --release -- --context <ctx>.
Apple Silicon + Intel. Signed & notarized — open the .dmg, drag KuberNation to Applications, and launch. No Gatekeeper workaround needed.
Unpack and run against your current context:
tar xzf kubernation-*-linux-x86_64.tar.gz
./kubernation
Unzip and run. Unsigned, so SmartScreen may warn on first launch — choose “More info ▸ Run anyway”.
kubernation.exe
It's a windowed desktop app (not a TUI), so it needs a display — it runs on your laptop, not over SSH. It needs read access to the usual kinds; the few write actions each check RBAC and show as locked if you lack the verb.