Skip to content
KubeGlass

Introduction

KubeGlass is a browser-based Kubernetes operations workspace. One Go binary serves the React frontend, proxies the Kubernetes API, and gives you fast daily operations, multi-cluster visibility, and team-safe governance — with zero infrastructure overhead.

Why teams switch to KubeGlass

Section titled “Why teams switch to KubeGlass”
Coming fromWhat you gain
Lens / OpenLensNo Electron, no desktop app. Browser access, lighter resource usage, same daily workflows plus fleet management and governance
k9sKeep your keyboard speed (⌘K, colon commands, j/k navigation) while adding visual workflows, shared dashboards, and team-safe RBAC
RancherDay-2 operations visibility without standing up a separate platform. Lighter, faster, same multi-cluster coverage
Cloud consolesOne consistent UI across EKS, GKE, AKS, OpenShift, k3s, and every other distribution. Escape vendor fragmentation
kubectl + browser tabsEverything in one workspace: live resources, terminal, logs, RBAC, cost, drift, and AI investigation

Core capabilities

Section titled “Core capabilities”
  • Real-time operations — WebSocket watch streams, keyboard-first navigation, integrated terminal, command palette
  • Multi-cluster fleet — Parallel health probes, cross-cluster diff, environment-aware context switching, fleet-wide scanning
  • Governance and security — RBAC matrix, audit logging, OIDC auth, per-session isolation, impersonation
  • Observability — Health scanning, cost analysis, drift detection, service mesh visualization
  • Change management — GitOps (Argo CD, Flux CD), IaC topology, safe mutation workflows
  • AI investigation — Built-in MCP server with 95 Kubernetes tools for VS Code Copilot, Claude Desktop, or any MCP client

What KubeGlass is not

Section titled “What KubeGlass is not”
  • Not a CI/CD pipeline - it observes your clusters, it doesn’t deploy to them
  • Not a service mesh control plane - it visualizes Istio/Envoy, it doesn’t replace them
  • Not a monitoring backend - it reads from Prometheus, it doesn’t store time-series data

Supported distributions

Section titled “Supported distributions”

KubeGlass auto-detects 29 Kubernetes distributions including Amazon EKS, Google GKE, Azure AKS, Red Hat OpenShift, ARO, ROSA, k3s, RKE2, Rancher, VMware Tanzu, MicroK8s, minikube, kind, Docker Desktop, and more. No per-distro configuration required.

Architecture overview

Section titled “Architecture overview”
KubeGlass architecture: Browser with React SPA connects via HTTPS/WSS to Go binary with middleware stack, which connects to Kubernetes API and BoltDB

The Go binary embeds the frontend at compile time. It reads your existing kubeconfig, auto-discovers available API groups (including CRDs), and starts serving on port 8090. Every mutation passes through Kubernetes RBAC via user impersonation.

For the full architecture breakdown, see Architecture Overview.

Next steps

Section titled “Next steps”