Hi everyone! We’re Philip and Louis, the co-founders of Glasskube.

TLDR: Glasskube is an open source package manager for Kubernetes that makes deploying, updating, and configuring packages on Kubernetes 20x faster than tools like Helm or Kustomize. Inspired by the simplicity of Homebrew and npm, our goal is to build enterprise-ready infrastructure software that can run mission-critical workloads across the more than 3 million Kubernetes clusters globally.

Glasskube is fully open source. Check out our repository on GitHub. (We'd appreciate a star 🌟)

The Backstory & Problem

Kubernetes packages have been growing rapidly, from around 100 packages in 2016 to over 800 packages on the CNCF landscape today. With more than 7 million developers working with Kubernetes, Helm, an open-source tool created during a hackathon nine years ago, has become the go-to solution. However, Helm struggles to keep up with the increasing demand, leading to complex workflows and non-standardized solutions.

Over the past five years, writing and deploying packages on Kubernetes, we found ourselves defaulting to Helm despite its shortcomings due to a lack of alternatives. While working on other cloud-native projects, users consistently highlighted common pain points with Helm. This realization prompted us to tackle the larger issue of package management in Kubernetes, leading to the development of Glasskube.

What is Glasskube?

Glasskube brings the experience of Homebrew or npm to your Kubernetes cluster. It simplifies installation, updates, and configuration, making it easier and faster to manage your packages.

Focusing on simplicity and reliability with our CLI and UI

Easily install packages in your cluster via the Glasskube UI, where all packages are conveniently located, eliminating the need to search for a Helm repository.

Safe Package Updates

Preview and perform pending updates to your desired version with a single click (or CLI command). All updates are pre-tested by the Glasskube test suite.

Package configurations

Configure packages with typesafe input values via the UI or interactive CLI questionnaire. Inject values from other packages, ConfigMaps, and Secrets easily. No more untyped and undocumented values.yaml files.

GitOps Integration

All Glasskube packages are custom resources, manageable via GitOps. We're also integrating with renovate.

Read also more about dependency management, multiple repositories and private packages on our website.

Interested? Check out our Demo.

Our Vision

Currently, we are focused on enhancing the user experience, aiming to save engineers as much time as possible by building on top of existing technologies. In the future, we plan to develop an entirely new packaging and bundling format for all cloud-native packages. This will provide package developers with a straightforward way to define how to install and configure packages, offer simple upgrade paths, and enable us to provide feedback, crash reports, and analytics to every developer working on Kubernetes packages, similar to how Android supports Play Store developers.

Presignup - Glasskube Cloud

We are currently working on Glasskube Cloud, for which you can now pre-signup. Key features include:

• Cloud Hosted Private Packages
• Security Alerts and Update Notifications
• Advanced GitOps Integrations (intelligent insights on upgrade success probability, smart config migration suggestions, enhanced open PRs showing detailed changes at manifest/resource level)

Our Asks

We love talking to engineers and anyone interested in DevOps who uses Kubernetes. You can schedule a call with Louis and Philip here.

If you find this interesting and would like to try it out:

• Presignup for Glasskube Cloud
• Check out our repository on GitHub.