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Kunobi team
~3 min read

Kunobi v1.0.0 Is Here

After months of feedback, testing, fixing, and release-by-release improvements, Kunobi is moving from beta to stable.

Most of the work behind v1.0.0 came from real workflows, bug reports, usability friction, and conversations with teams managing GitOps environments at scale. Thank you for the feedback.


How it started

Kunobi started from a straightforward frustration.

As GitOps environments grew, visibility got harder. Teams ended up stitching together Lens, k9s, GitOps CLIs, dashboards, YAML diffs, terminals, and browser tabs just to answer basic operational questions:

  • What's deployed where?
  • What changed?
  • Why is this drift happening?
  • Which cluster is actually broken?

The workflows worked. But they became harder to reason about as environments scaled.

Beta confirmed this pain was real.


What changed between beta and v1.0.0

v1.0.0 came from the steady loop of shipping, observing how people actually used the product, then refining workflows release by release.

Visibility

Drilldown navigation became clearer and easier to follow. Full Kubernetes event history was added so troubleshooting no longer stops at the latest few entries. Reverse ownership navigation made resource relationships easier to trace across deployments, workloads, and GitOps objects.

Troubleshooting workflows

Logs and terminal workflows were heavily improved throughout the beta cycle. Helm diff and revision history made deployment changes easier to inspect without jumping between tools. Navigation between clusters and contexts became faster during incident response.

Workflow refinements

Improved editors, cluster presets, keyboard navigation, resource-specific improvements, better filtering, and general UI cleanup — all from observing where operational friction remained.

None of these changes individually define v1.0.0. Together, they made Kunobi more stable, faster, and easier to operate day to day.


Why we launched a Community Edition

v1.0.0 includes a free Community Edition.

The goal was to let engineers and teams use Kunobi in actual Kubernetes and GitOps workflows, then decide whether it fits their environment — without a commitment upfront.

Much of the product direction during beta came directly from community feedback: navigation, troubleshooting, GitOps visibility, workflow ergonomics. The Community Edition keeps that loop open.


What Kunobi is today

Kunobi is a Kubernetes and GitOps workspace focused on multi-cluster visibility, native GitOps workflows, and faster troubleshooting.

It works with existing environments rather than trying to replace them.

FluxCD and ArgoCD are both supported natively. Kunobi stays local-first, connects directly to your clusters, and is designed to complement existing CLI workflows.

The goal was never to replace kubectl.

The goal was to reduce operational blindness — the mental stitching required to understand what's actually happening across clusters.


Design Partnership Program

Alongside v1.0.0, we're opening a Design Partnership program for teams running Kubernetes and GitOps environments at real scale.

The goal is to work directly with platform engineers, SREs, and infrastructure teams to shape the next generation of workflows inside Kunobi — faster troubleshooting, better multi-cluster visibility, GitOps ergonomics, and the messy edge cases that only appear in production.

It's a small, hands-on program with direct access to the team building the product.

Learn more about the Design Partnership program


What comes next

v1.0.0 is a milestone, but also the foundation for the next stage of the product.

During the beta cycle we started laying groundwork for licensing, marketplace integrations, and broader workflow extensions that will continue evolving over future releases.

The core direction stays the same: make Kubernetes and GitOps environments easier to understand, troubleshoot, and operate — without adding more operational complexity.

Read the full v1.0.0 changelog


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If you used Kunobi during beta, now's a good time to take another look.

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