// the find
cyclops-ui/cyclops
Developer Friendly Kubernetes 👁️
Cyclops is a Kubernetes UI layer that turns Helm charts into generated web forms, letting non-engineers deploy and configure applications without touching YAML. It runs as a controller in your cluster, exposes a React frontend, and lets platform teams define what fields developers can tweak via JSON Schema in the Helm chart's values file. It's aimed squarely at platform teams who want guardrails around what their developers can break.
The Helm-native approach is smart — you don't need to write Cyclops-specific templates; any existing chart works, and your templates stay in Git as normal charts. The JSON Schema-driven form generation means validation is defined once in the chart and enforced in the UI, not bolted on separately. The SSE-based live resource view and the built-in pod exec/log access are genuinely useful and save context-switching to kubectl for common operations. CNCF Landscape inclusion and 764 forks suggest real adoption, not vaporware.
No RBAC or authentication yet — it's explicitly on the roadmap but currently absent, which means you cannot safely expose this to developers in a multi-tenant cluster without wrapping it in something else. Template rendering is Helm-only; Kustomize support is listed as a future goal, so if your org standardized on Kustomize you're out of luck today. The in-cluster deployment model means the controller has broad cluster permissions by default, and the RBAC manifests in config/rbac are quite permissive — worth auditing before running in production. GitOps integration is also unfinished, so this sits awkwardly alongside Flux or Argo CD rather than complementing them cleanly.