// the find
rigdev/rig
The DevEx & Application-layer for your Internal Developer Platform ⛵
Rig is a Kubernetes application platform that sits between your raw cluster and your developers — wrapping deployments, scaling, and rollouts in a higher-level 'Capsule' abstraction with a CLI and dashboard. It targets platform engineering teams who want to give developers a Heroku-like interface without leaving Kubernetes. Last commit was January 2025, which is concerning for a platform-layer tool.
The plugin architecture is genuinely well-designed — each concern (ingress, cron, service accounts, VPA) is a discrete plugin rather than baked into a monolith, so you can swap out only what you need. The protobuf-first API means client generation is straightforward and the contract is explicit. The 'rig-ops migrate' tooling for importing existing Helm releases into Capsules is a real differentiator — migration paths are usually an afterthought. Separate operator and platform components means you can run the CRD layer without the full platform if you only want the abstraction.
1,067 stars and 49 forks after what appears to be a few years of development is a weak adoption signal for infrastructure software — you'd want 10x that before betting a production platform on it. The last push being January 2025 with no recent activity suggests the project may be on life support or pivoting. The open-core model is underdocumented — it's not clear from the README what exactly is behind the commercial tier versus what's genuinely open. The 'Capsule' naming collides with the existing CNCF Capsule project (namespace tenancy), which will cause search confusion and suggests the namespace wasn't well researched.