What is Barney Kube?

Have you met my pods?

Barney Kube · your cluster's wingman

Barney Kube is a Kubernetes client for macOS, written in Swift. It reads the same kubeconfig kubectl uses and talks straight to the Kubernetes API, so the clusters you reach from Terminal show up here with nothing to set up.

Electron clients easily take 500 MB to a gigabyte of memory to show a few pods. Barney does the same job in tens of megabytes, and the download is about 9 MB. It is free for personal and commercial use.

What it does

• Opens your clusters from ~/.kube/config: client certificates, tokens and exec plugins (EKS, GKE, AKS), several clusters at once as tabs.
• Keeps everything live. Each list loads once and a watch stream updates it as objects change.
• Browses 19 built-in kinds and every Custom Resource on the cluster, with live CPU and memory for pods and nodes.
• Shows what's broken on one screen: every unhealthy pod and NotReady node.
• Follows the graph from any object to the ones it really touches.
• Streams logs for a pod or a whole workload, including the previous run of a container that crashed.
• Operates the cluster: a real terminal, file copy, port forwarding, scale, restart, delete, rollback, cordon and drain, each with a confirmation.
• Keeps secrets masked until you ask to see them.

It speaks English, Portuguese and Spanish.

Start here

1. Install and update
2. Connecting to clusters
3. The workspace

Questions

Does it need an agent or anything installed in the cluster? No. It uses the API with your own credentials. Live CPU and memory need the cluster's metrics-server, like kubectl top.

Does it collect anything? No. See Security and privacy.

Which macOS? macOS 26 Tahoe or later.