xlskubectl – a spreadsheet to control your Kubernetes cluster
73 comments
·March 13, 2025danielepolencic
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.
javcasas
A Jira version. Children look under the bed afraid of finding monsters. Monsters look under the bed afraid of finding you.
a012
Fantastic, now my PM can just go ahead create a ticket to scale the workloads without having me to update the spreadsheet again
freedomben
when you get a chance, please add Office 97 compatibility and release an Electron-based native app. Also the page doesn't load properly on IE6. Thanks!
organsnyder
How about a Workday version? Maybe also one integrated with an Epic EMR somehow?
freedomben
Ooh yes! Also would love a Salesforce integration so the sales team can scale up without talking to eng. Bonus points if they can add and remove nodes
ryanisnan
This is a cursed project, but I can't help but admire it.
baq
Yaml is more cursed. This is great.
Tade0
Please do. My manager is going to love this.
ihsw
[dead]
dhab
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)
anner_
Is this feature what you're looking for?
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/display-the-relat...
philips
Today I learned.
Here is the doc for Google sheets: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/63175?hl=en&co=GENIE....
rickdeckard
> 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 usually handle this in MS Excel by searching "in workbook" and "in formulas". Works even better when the elements are in a named cell which is referenced in formulas (i.e. "stat.infra.APIrequests" instead of "$A$5"), this way you can also globally change the element by reassigning the cell-name to another cell
baq
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.
hnlmorg
The problem with spreadsheets vs regular tables is that spreadsheets allow for a lot of customisation (which is kind of the point of a spreadsheet vs a table).
As a programming interface, that makes spreadsheets deceptively powerful. But as a UI were you need to have control over how the user interacts, that makes spreadsheets incredibly painful to integrate.
Source: myself. I worked on a project around 20 years ago which integrated a spreadsheet into its UI and the number of ways people would break the application each month was mind boggling.
xtracto
The great thing about spreadsheets is that most grown ups understand them.
I've used it as the best UI for Accountants, Lawyers and other people that are famous for being afraid of technology. It's a great "bridge between "the system" and the people who want to get something from it.
bee_rider
If I were an accountant, I would be afraid of a lot of technology. In particular, if somebody offered me a Python code, and I didn’t know Python, I’d be quite worried about the handling of rounding and that sort of stuff, by some random programmer.
Excel was also written by some random programmer. But the code that does anything complicated was at least used by everybody in my field, so if there’s a hidden bug in there, at least the responsibility is diffuse. And the code written by me or by someone at my office… well, you can at least see what every cell does.
hnlmorg
I’m not disputing spreadsheets as an assessable IDE for “non-programmers”.
I’m a big fan of spreadsheets for “getting shit done”.
But if you’re building a UI for other people to consume, you’ll quickly find that they’d break it in all manner of exotic ways.
This is why CRUD solutions exist. Sometimes you want the relational bookkeeping but with a more restricted UI. In those type of scenarios even MS Access is a better option than Excel (for example).
bee_rider
I wonder… there are all sorts of cloud offerings for office suites nowadays. Google, Microsoft.
If you have a shared spreadsheet in one of these systems, surely there must be some way to lock down some rows and columns, right? Then, the spreadsheet simply becomes a program where intermediary values are displayed and can be read. It seems really convenient.
hnlmorg
There are ways. But there’s also countless ways you can mess with the contents. Plus the problem that spreadsheet “administrators” need to unlock to make their changes and remember to re-enable those locks when they’re done.
At some point, something invariably gets missed and someone else finds a way to tamper with it.
Bear in mind that the “tamperers” are never doing so maliciously. They’re just trying to do their job too. But when you have a UI that allows for unlimited abstractions, those “tamperers” will dream up a new way to represent their needs without realising that they’re breaking someone else’s workflow.
johannes1234321
There are a bunch of options for blocking cells from being edited etc.
Excel pros (I am none) can do quite some nice tools on top of Excel.
Excel runs the world ...
hnlmorg
> There are a bunch of options for blocking cells from being edited etc.
I’ve already addressed this and the problems with that approach.
> Excel pros (I am none) can do quite some nice tools on top of Excel.
As I explained in my OP, I was one of them.
> Excel runs the world ...
I agree. I never claimed otherwise. So I don’t really understand your point here if it’s not to make a strawman argument.
davedx
Anything is better than cursed yaml
trollbridge
I’m developing an app right now which uses a spreadsheet as its principal UI. It will be a painful process to gradually wean the users off of that.
nicman23
the bar is in hell
mns06
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
osigurdson
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."
GuinansEyebrows
They’re not worse than YAML…
cm2187
In fact as a configuration file, spreadsheets are a much superior UI, you can change lots of numbers very quickly if your config is tabular in nature. Whether it is a good idea that what you type should modify a prod environment live is a different question. Working in finance and living in spreadsheet it sounds like a terrible design to me. You want to be to inspect the whole config change before it affects the target system.
progbits
Also in spreadsheet you can do proper computation, reference other values, make VLOOKUPs. So much better than YAML where the entire ecosystem seems to pretend there isn't a need for abstraction in configs.
osigurdson
Agree. I don't many use cases for manually editing the numbers of various things.
brainzap
I actually export a spreadsheet to review the memory limits.
fulafel
> xlskubectl integrates Google Spreadsheet with Kubernetes
Great trolling in the name as well
ithkuil
Other possible names:
kubexls
kubecalc
tabelnetes
kube123
jauntywundrkind
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
osigurdson
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)
awsanswers
This is useful and necessary software. Keep going. This can be a wonderful demystifyer for some and a useful tool for others.
layer8
Maybe someone could make xlsiptables.
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.)