// the find
Edgenesis/shifu
Kubernetes-native IoT gateway
Shifu is a Kubernetes operator that wraps physical IoT devices as in-cluster microservices — each device gets its own pod (a DeviceShifu) exposing a uniform HTTP API regardless of whether the underlying protocol is MQTT, OPC-UA, Modbus, or raw TCP. It's aimed at IIoT teams who already run Kubernetes and want to treat factory floor hardware the same way they treat any other service. The CNCF landscape inclusion and 100+ changelog entries suggest it's been developed seriously over time.
The protocol abstraction is the real value here: OPC-UA, LwM2M, MQTT, TCP socket, and HTTP all surface as the same HTTP endpoint inside the cluster, which means your application code never has to know what's on the other end. The CRD-per-device model is a good fit for Kubernetes-native tooling — you get RBAC, namespacing, and resource lifecycle management for free. The telemetry service design (pluggable sinks: MQTT, MinIO, SQL, TDEngine) is practical for industrial environments where data goes to many places at once. Active biweekly releases with dual-language changelogs and a golangci-lint gate suggest this isn't abandonware.
Still at v0.x after 100+ releases, which means the API is officially unstable — CRD schemas could change and break your device configs. The 1.4k stars is modest for a project with this scope and this much version history; community adoption outside the Edgenesis orbit is unclear. There's no obvious story for devices that need stateful sessions or that push data unprompted on their own schedule — the HTTP polling model works for request/response but gets awkward with event-driven hardware. Documentation lives on an external site and the in-repo docs are a mix of English, Chinese, and Japanese with no clear parity, so you may hit dead ends depending on which language you follow.