K9s

K9s is an open source terminal-based user interface for Kubernetes cluster management, written in Go by Fernand Galiana under the GitHub handle derailed. It provides a fast, keyboard-driven way to navigate, observe, and manage Kubernetes resources without relying on kubectl commands or web-based dashboards. K9s tracks real-time cluster activity, displaying pods, deployments, services, configmaps, secrets, and custom resource definitions in a vim-like interface with split-pane views. The tool supports cluster-wide metrics collection, showing CPU and memory usage at the container, pod, and node levels. Power users can define custom aliases, hotkeys, and plugins to streamline repetitive workflows such as log tailing, port forwarding, container shell access, and pod scaling. K9s includes specialized views like Pulses for a dashboard-style health overview, XRay for resource dependency visualization, and an RBAC reverse-lookup view that shows which subjects have access to a given resource. Built-in HTTP benchmarking allows users to stress-test service endpoints directly from the terminal. The tool supports multi-cluster configuration, kubecontext switching, and multiple Kubernetes API versions simultaneously. K9s is highly customizable through skins, and its plugin architecture supports shell commands, Lua scripts, and Go binaries. Released under the Apache 2.0 license, the project is maintained by Imhotep Software LLC and has accumulated over 25,000 GitHub stars. K9s has become a staple in the Kubernetes ecosystem, widely adopted by platform engineering teams for its responsiveness and deep observability capabilities.