At present, Kubernetes plays an important role in application development. It is a cluster management system for managing containerised applications across multiple hosts, providing mechanisms for deployment, maintenance, and scaling of applications. The system was released in 2014 by tech giant Google, and currently, it powers the Google Container Engine, which is a part of Google Cloud Platform, upon which many new products and services are built.

Here is a list of the top ten most useful Kubernetes open-source projects to watch out for in 2021.

(The list is in alphabetical order)

1| Helm

About: Helm is a popular open-source package manager for Kubernetes that helps users manage the Kubernetes applications. The package manager employs a packaging format known as charts, a collection of files that define a related set of Kubernetes resources. A single chart might be utilised to deploy a Memcached pod or full web app stack with HTTP servers, databases, caches, and so on. The Helm charts help in defining, installing and upgrading the applications. 

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2| Kubeflow

About: Kubeflow is a Cloud-Native platform for machine learning based on Google’s internal machine learning pipelines. It is an open, community-driven project to make it easy to deploy and manage an ML stack on Kubernetes. The project is dedicated to executing deployments of machine learning workflows on the Kubernetes. For instance, Kubeflow includes services to create and manage interactive Jupyter notebooks, provides a custom TensorFlow training job operator that can be used to train ML models, etc. It also supports a TensorFlow Serving container to export trained TensorFlow models to Kubernetes and more. 

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3| Kubetail

About: Kubetail is an open-source project that is written in Bash Script. It enables users to aggregate (tail/follow) logs from multiple pods into one stream. The tool basically allows users to monitor the logs from a number of pods and one can also follow or tail the logs according to their pod names.

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4| Knative

About: Knative is an open-source community project that works by adding components for deploying, running, and managing serverless, cloud-native applications to Kubernetes. It eliminates the tasks of provisioning and managing servers, which in result, allow the developers to focus on their codes without the need to worry about setting up complex infrastructures. Some of its features include running serverless containers on Kubernetes with ease, pluggable components that let you bring your own logging and monitoring, networking, and service mesh. It can be used with common tools and frameworks such as Django, Ruby on Rails, Spring, and many more.

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5| Kubespray

About: Kubespray is a composition of Ansible playbooks, inventory, provisioning tools, and domain knowledge for generic OS/Kubernetes clusters configuration management tasks. Kubespray is a combination of Kubernetes and Ansible. It provides deployment flexibility, highly available cluster, composable attributes, support for most popular Linux distributions and more.

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6| Kube-capacity

About: Kube-capacity is a simple CLI that provides an overview of the resource requests, limits, and utilisation in a Kubernetes cluster. The tool strives to merge the most useful parts of the output from kubectl top and kubectl and then describe it into an easy-to-use CLI focused on cluster resources. 

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7| Prometheus

About: Prometheus is an open-source system monitoring and alerting toolkit originally built at SoundCloud. The tool can be used to monitor Kubernetes clusters. This tool’s main features include a multi-dimensional data model with time-series data that are being identified by metric name and key or value pairs. PromQL is a query language that leverages this dimensionality; time-series collection happens via a pull model over HTTP and more. 

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8| Quarkus 

Quarkus is an open-source, full-stack Kubernetes-native Java framework made for Java virtual machines (JVMs) and native compilation. It is basically a Kubernetes Native Java stack tailored for OpenJDK HotSpot and GraalVM. Quarkus is designed to work with popular Java frameworks and libraries like Eclipse MicroProfile, Apache Kafka, RESTEasy (JAX-RS), Spring, Infinispan and many more. 

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9| Sonobuoy

About: Sonobuoy is an open-source diagnostic tool that makes it easier to understand the state of a Kubernetes cluster by running a set of Kubernetes conformance tests and other plugins in an accessible and non-destructive manner. The selective data dumps of Kubernetes resource objects and cluster nodes in Sonobuoy allow for integrated end-to-end conformance-testing, workload debugging and custom data collection via extensible plugins. Starting from version 0.20, Sonobuoy supports Kubernetes v1.17 or later. 

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10| Wayne

About: Wayne is an open-source, web-based Kubernetes multi-cluster management and publishing platform. It reduces service access costs by visualising Kubernetes object template editing. By visualising Kubernetes object template editing, it reduces business access costs. Also, it has a complete rights management system and adapts to multi-tenant scenarios.

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