ClusterOrbit

Something breaks on a Saturday. You have a phone. Every Kubernetes tool worth using assumes you have a laptop.

What it is

ClusterOrbit is a mobile-first tool for visualizing and operating Kubernetes clusters, including k3s, from a phone or tablet. It is not a cramped kubectl wrapper. The focus is fast topology rendering, machine-centric inspection, and guarded administrative actions on an interface built for the screen it's actually running on.

Free.

What it does well

Spatial, not list-shaped. An interactive topology view with pan, zoom, lane-based layout, and curved links — because how machines, workloads, and services relate is the thing lists are worst at showing.

Adaptive to the device. Phone gets bottom tabs and a list-first view; tablet gets a side rail and an inspector panel; the shell switches at 960px rather than stretching one layout across both.

Two connection modes. Direct parses a kubeconfig on-device and hits the API server straight. Gateway brokers through a small Go service with shared-token auth, per-identity rate limiting, TLS with optional mTLS, and a JSON-Lines audit log of every mutation.

Guarded mutations. Workload scaling works today across sample, direct, and gateway modes. Node cordon and drain are gated by policy on the gateway, with a two-person approval flow.

Offline-tolerant. A SQLite snapshot cache with schema migrations, saved connections, swipe-to-refresh everywhere, and a visible last-refreshed indicator.

Who it's for

Anyone on call for a cluster who would like the first ten minutes of an incident to not require finding a laptop.

Homelab and k3s operators who want a real interface to a small cluster.

What it looks like in practice

An alert lands. The operator opens the app, sees the topology with the unschedulable node highlighted, taps through to the node detail, checks the drift view on the changes tab, and scales a workload back down — through the gateway, which writes the mutation to an audit log and required a second approver for anything heavier.

What it's not

It's not a config editor. Viewing, editing, diffing, and guarded apply aren't built.

It's not real-time. Snapshots are polled on refresh and a 30-second timer, not watched.

It's not a topology engine yet. The current view is a view — filtering, level-of-detail, and force-directed layout are still ahead.

Status

Shipping features steadily as a lab project. The Flutter app has topology, list, alerts, resources, and changes views; onboarding with sample, gateway, and kubeconfig paths; a saved-connection store; and workload scaling. The Go gateway has clusters, snapshot, events, and scale endpoints, plus token auth, rate limiting, TLS/mTLS, audit logging, node-policy gating on cordon and drain, and a two-person approval flow. Not built: config editing, node join/label/taint, and real-time watch. Tech: Flutter + sqflite + a Go gateway.