01
Obsessively lightweight
A 9 MB download that idles in tens of megabytes — where Electron-based cluster tools eat 500 MB to a full gigabyte. It stays fast on a laptop with a dozen tabs open.
For macOS
Barney Kube
Kubernetes, without the 500 MB suit.
Barney Kube is a native macOS Kubernetes client that does what Lens does in a fraction of the memory. It reads your kubeconfig and authenticates exactly like kubectl — client certs, tokens, and exec plugins for EKS, GKE, and AKS, re-authing automatically when cloud tokens age out — and talks to your clusters over a secure, verified connection. Open clusters as tabs and work with 19 resource kinds plus every CRD on the cluster: walk the graph from a Deployment to its actual pods to the node they run on, see everything unhealthy across every namespace in one list, stream a whole workload’s logs at once, open a real terminal in any container, port-forward, edit YAML and apply, restart, scale, and delete — everything updates the instant it changes on the cluster. Speaks English, Portuguese, and Spanish.
Download for Mac Free · macOS 26+ · 9 MB
What it does
13 things, done well 02
If kubectl works, Barney works
Reads ~/.kube/config and authenticates like the CLI: client certs, tokens, and exec plugins for EKS, GKE, and AKS — re-authing on its own when cloud tokens expire, so long sessions never break.
03
Follow the graph
Every object has a Related tab: a Deployment’s actual pods, the node a pod runs on, the Services in front of it, the ConfigMaps and Secrets it mounts, an Ingress’s backends. Kubernetes records these links from one side only — this walks the other direction, and every row is clickable.
04
One screen for what’s broken
The Issues view lists every unhealthy pod and NotReady node across every namespace, with its reason and where it’s running. Click one to jump straight to it.
05
Logs that match how you debug
A whole workload’s pods merged into one stream, a color and a name each. The previous log of a container that restarted, labelled with the exit code that killed it. Server-side timestamps, and save to a file.
06
Search everywhere, instantly
⌘K searches every kind, every namespace, all at once — no cluster open, it brings up the picker and focuses the filter instead of doing nothing.
07
Live, never polled
Watch streams keep every grid current, CPU/memory columns update from metrics-server, logs follow in real time, and events feed per object or cluster-wide.
08
A real terminal, in-app
Exec into any container with a full TTY — colors, cursor apps, resize — plus attach mode and binary-safe file upload/download.
09
Secrets stay masked
Values are hidden by default everywhere they're shown — overview, copy, edit — with an explicit Reveal you control per object.
10
Operate, not just observe
Restart pods, scale workloads from a stepper, delete with confirmation, and edit YAML inline with kubectl-style apply — diff what changed before you commit it.
11
Cordon, drain & node management
Cordon or uncordon a node, or drain it — evicting pods with a live progress sheet that keeps DaemonSets and mirror pods put and retries past PodDisruptionBudgets, exactly like kubectl drain. Cordoned nodes wear a badge.
12
Every action, everywhere
Hover any row for a full actions menu mirroring the detail header — forward, scale, edit, restart, cordon, drain, delete — plus an explicit pod Delete that tells you whether a controller will recreate it.
13
Know which cluster is which
Pin your favorite clusters so they float to the top, environment badges (prod/staging/hml…) on cards and tabs, provider chips, a live apiserver ping, and sortable columns by name, status, CPU, memory, or age.
What you need
- Runs on
- macOS 26 or later
- Price
- Free
- Download
- 9 MB
- Works with
- Any cluster your kubeconfig reaches — EKS, GKE, AKS, local
- Resources
- 19 built-in kinds, plus every CRD on the cluster
- Updates
- Automatic, in the background
