#147 Kubernetes Dashboard is gone. Is Headlamp the UI that kills the terminal?
In this episode we talk to Joaquim Rocha, engineer at Immutable and creator and maintainer of Headlamp, the UI that has become the successor of the deprecated Kubernetes Dashboard. From games to open source Joaquim, who is from Portugal, planned to study computer science and make games in Japan. Then he discovered Linux at university and fell in love with open source. His path led through the GNOME community, Linux phones for Nokia, CERN, an educational Linux startup, and finally Kinvolk in Berlin, where Headlamp was born. We also bond over Metal Gear Solid.Why Headlamp exists Kinvolk needed a graphical UI to showcase its Kubernetes distro, Lokomotive. Existing dashboards were hard to extend, and users had to pick between desktop and web. Headlamp does both and was built to be extensible from the ground up. The first release was around 2020. After Kinvolk was acquired by Microsoft, the project kept going, and it has now joined Kubernetes under SIG UI.Design choices that set it apartLean: it works with vanilla Kubernetes and any flavor, and needs nothing extra installed in the cluster.No authentication layer of its own: the desktop app uses your kubeconfig, so everything goes through Kubernetes RBAC.Permission-aware UI: if you can’t delete a pod, you don’t see the delete button.The namespace challenge: if you can’t list all namespaces, as in many corporate setups, you can configure allowed namespaces. Joaquim also notes that Kubernetes has no standard way to ask which namespaces you may list. The plugin system Plugins are JavaScript/TypeScript bundles that anyone can write, and AI makes it even easier. They can change the UI, fetch cluster data through a wrapper API, and set clusters and namespaces dynamically.Desktop vs. web: on the desktop, you install plugins from the built-in plugin catalog. In a shared web deployment, the admin chooses which plugins to include. Prometheus is always shipped, and the metrics UI is hidden if you don’t have it.Examples: Flux (including quick sync and pausing reconciliation), KEDA, Gateway API, cert-manager, and AKS Desktop. Plugins for EKS and GCP are wanted.Distribution: the “plugin store” is decentralized and built on Artifact Hub. By default only official, verified plugins show, with a switch to see everything. Trust in third-party plugin authors is an open question.UI vs. CLI vs. AI A UI helps newcomers build a mental model of Kubernetes, which matters when 60–75% of KubeCon attendees are newcomers. Headlamp’s AI assistant plugin passes the context of what you’re looking at to the model, so you can ask “what’s going on here?” on a pod list. Next up are inline AI buttons, such as explaining or resolving warnings on the events page, and more integrations for CNCF projects so you don’t have to switch between UIs. Crystal ball Joaquim hopes the complexity of Kubernetes gets better tamed, and that the community keeps thriving. And the name? A headlamp is the headlight of an old train, a nod to Kinvolk’s train theme and the logo.Stuur ons een bericht.ACC ICT Specialist in IT-CONTINUÏTEIT Bedrijfskritische applicaties én data veilig beschikbaar, onafhankelijk van derden, altijd en overal Dutch Cloud Native Day 2026Two days of cloud native talks, workshops and community in Utrecht, exploring how AI is changing the way we build, run and scale modern platforms.Like and subscribe! It helps out a lot.You can also find us on:De Nederlandse Kubernetes Podcast - YouTubeNederlandse Kubernetes Podcast (@k8spodcast.nl) | TikTokDe Nederlandse Kubernetes PodcastWhere can you meet us:EventsThis Podcast is powered by:ACC ICT - IT-Continuïteit voor Bedrijfskritische Applicaties | ACC ICT