K9s vs K8s

DevOpsNinjaHub
1 min readFeb 11, 2024

K9s and K8s are two different tools used in the context of Kubernetes, which is an open-source container orchestration platform. Here’s a brief overview of each:

K8s (Kubernetes):

  • Kubernetes (often abbreviated as K8s, derived from its eight letters between ‘K’ and ‘s’) is a container orchestration platform for automating the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.
  • It provides features such as container orchestration, automated scaling, service discovery, load balancing, and self-healing capabilities for applications running in containers.
  • Kubernetes has become the de facto standard for container orchestration in cloud-native application development and deployment.

K9s:

  • K9s is a command-line interface (CLI) tool used for interacting with Kubernetes clusters. It provides a terminal-based UI (TUI) for managing and monitoring Kubernetes resources.
  • K9s offers features such as viewing resources, inspecting logs, executing commands in containers, navigating through namespaces, and performing various management tasks within Kubernetes clusters.
  • It offers a more user-friendly and efficient way for developers and administrators to interact with Kubernetes clusters compared to using kubectl commands directly.

In summary, Kubernetes (K8s) is the container orchestration platform itself, while K9s is a tool designed to enhance the management and monitoring of Kubernetes clusters through a terminal-based UI. They serve different purposes but are often used together to streamline Kubernetes cluster operations.

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