xlskubectl – a spreadsheet to control your Kubernetes cluster

by pabs3on 3/13/2025, 1:12 AMwith 74 comments

by danielepolencicon 3/13/2025, 11:53 AM

Hey, I'm the person behind this project. Thank you for sharing this. Many people have reached out to improve it, and I might come back with a Jira version one day.

by dhabon 3/13/2025, 6:12 AM

Love it. I generally avoided excel when my previous role was a dev. Now, leading a team - I find it more useful as it's a little universe to add various computations (counts, min, max) of various sorts of data that I want to keep track across projects & create charts etc, create rapid UIs (project timelines etc) and easily change them when required, invite collaborators, use that to replace slides to drive meeting discussions

It's quite versatile. I had never considered this angle of using it to manage and sync with something external like Kubernetes here and love it.

I wish someone also solved the issue with excel around refactoring though - esp when cells are being used in formulas, if there was a "Find All References" or Cmd+SHIFT+F (global find) of elements used in formula (not their values) - it would step it up even more towards maintainability.

(I understand it buckles under huge datasets, but I believe that's really over-use of the tool)

by baqon 3/13/2025, 5:22 AM

Better than yaml.

Spreadsheets are underused as an UI. Every time you embed a table component in your app you probably wouldn’t complain about it being one.

by mns06on 3/13/2025, 8:02 AM

Amazing. I used to run a startup that allowed you to write Python scripts that streamed data into Excel in real time - for eg. https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/8ddmui/rea...

The python scripts were deployed PaaS style into a Kubernetes cluster.

If only we'd had the insight to manage our control plane via Excel also, we'd probably be squillionaires by now. :P

by osigurdsonon 3/13/2025, 3:43 AM

I love the company's mission statement:

"Replacing YAML with spreadsheets has always been our mission as a company, and we will continue to do so."

by osigurdsonon 3/13/2025, 3:48 AM

The project is super active with lots of contributors as well. This thing is going take over!

(joking in case people didn't look - 2 commits 5 years ago)

by fulafelon 3/13/2025, 8:08 AM

> xlskubectl integrates Google Spreadsheet with Kubernetes

Great trolling in the name as well

by jauntywundrkindon 3/13/2025, 3:42 AM

Love it.

For a different sort of person, but there's some rather old efforts to expose Kubernetes & Etcd under FUSE , which would also be neat direct access. https://github.com/opencredo/KubeFuse https://github.com/cstavr/etcdfs

And since I was curious, there's also a spreadsheet to FUSE too, https://github.com/mk270/xls-fuse

As far as I know, the only 3d representation of Kubernetes is KubeDoom, https://github.com/storax/kubedoom

by awsanswerson 3/13/2025, 2:31 AM

This is useful and necessary software. Keep going. This can be a wonderful demystifyer for some and a useful tool for others.

by nativeiton 3/13/2025, 5:02 AM

I've never needed the distributed nature of Kubernetes, but I dig the notion of using a spreadsheet as a control interface. Does anyone know of a similar paradigm for other sysadmin applications?

by guaxon 3/14/2025, 9:17 AM

Someday at the office:

What do you mean our auto scaling strategy stopped working when we switched to Office 360?

by osigurdsonon 3/13/2025, 3:46 AM

I dunno, I tried making an example pod definition in a spreadsheet just to see what it looks like. It isn't better or more readable as everything is indented too much.

by layer8on 3/13/2025, 2:13 PM

Maybe someone could make xlsiptables.

by brainzapon 3/13/2025, 8:19 PM

I actually export a spreadsheet to review the memory limits.

by matttproudon 3/13/2025, 9:16 PM

Talk about taking declarative Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to a whole new absurd level.

(Or more like putting the manager back in the management plane.)

by adraon 3/13/2025, 2:17 AM

I don't care if this works or not it makes me giddy with glee at the idea. Thanks for making my day.

by stuff4benon 3/13/2025, 11:28 AM

I know several pointy haired bosses in real enterprise IT shops who would jump on this. Because everything is run on Excel/Google spreadsheets.

by hdjrudnion 3/13/2025, 4:18 AM

If it was read-only I wouldn't hate it so much. A table view of all my resources wouldn't be bad. But heaven forbidden if I hit a random number in a random cell!

by Aeolunon 3/13/2025, 8:19 AM

It’s called xls, but it uses Google sheets?

by casper14on 3/13/2025, 3:06 AM

The README and faq are really funny. "What??" as the first question is gold

by creston 3/13/2025, 2:30 PM

This has to be the perfect passive aggressive comeback to bitchslap a project manager with a mirco-management fetish into the PaaS cost control limits the moment they demonstrate the power at their fingertips by adding a few zeroes. You have setup those limits didn't you, project manager?

by jaimehrubikson 3/13/2025, 3:00 AM

Amazing software, a must have. They never merged my PR though.

by BirAdamon 3/13/2025, 2:24 AM

Taken the complex and making it so simple, fantastic.

by raffraffraffon 3/13/2025, 8:41 AM

Would love to mix this up with FluxCD

by benterixon 3/13/2025, 8:33 AM

This made my day!

by test6554on 3/13/2025, 3:13 AM

Now let’s map helm config files to csv and use pivot tables for networking

by arkhon 3/13/2025, 2:18 PM

I'm disappointed it does not run in excel but uses a google spreadsheet.

by ConanRuson 3/13/2025, 5:37 PM

sick bastard

by moondevon 3/13/2025, 5:09 AM

Now it just needs a kubectl plugin to launch Google sheets webpage with carbonyl for e2e terminal use

by nexttson 3/13/2025, 9:19 AM

Now quants can do devops

by Gee101on 3/13/2025, 3:28 AM

Does it mean you can give it Finance and get rid of the IT Operations team?