Kubernites

Kubernites is a cozy medieval town-builder with a secret: the realm you raise is a Kubernetes cluster.

It starts with one box. Ships bring cargo to your island, and you carry the first one up from the quay by hand. Soon porters carry for you, then whole crews, and an empty island grows into a town of timber huts, wheat fields and stone Keeps.

Under the thatch it is all real: every hut is a Pod, every Keep is a Node, and every calamity is one that real clusters suffer. You learn Kubernetes the way you learn any good strategy game: one problem at a time.

Raise a realm that runs itself

Borg, the old builder of realms, decrees four great halls. Once they stand, the realm seats new huts wherever a Keep has room and holds every crew at its count, however many huts fall.

Sound a War Horn, and your crews grow when the tide rises and shrink when it ebbs. Close the game, and the realm works on for up to two hours while you are away.

The land itself tells you how the realm is doing. A lantern burns on the road for every worker ready to serve, berry bushes are picked bare when workers go hungry, and ivy creeps up a Keep that has stood long without trouble.

When the Age turns, the whole town rebuilds itself in stone.

Keep it standing

Then something breaks. A crew's huts gutter, relight and gutter again. A graduate of the Academy never arrives. A worker grows past its room and is Voidtaken. The Simian Imp knocks huts down for sport, and the Rush Tide floods the quay.

In a real cluster they are called CrashLoopBackOff, ImagePullBackOff, OOMKilled, a chaos monkey and a load test, and they have the same causes and the same fixes. The ones that keep coming back, you mend by hand once, then teach the realm to mend them itself.

It was Kubernetes all along

Flip one switch and the realm drops its costume. Nothing in the town moves; only the words change. "Your servants did 214 things for you today" becomes "Kubernetes handled 214 things for you today", and everything you have built, hired and mended turns out to have had its real name all along.

You didn't study Kubernetes. You ran it. Switch back whenever you like: the story is for learning, the names are for keeping. (And yes, Borg, the old builder of realms, is named for Kubernetes' predecessor at Google.)

A real kubectl, if you want one

You never have to type. But if you want to, the Speaking Stone on the plaza is a kubectl console. It answers to speakstctlin the realm's tongue and to plain kubectl once the names are flipped: ask it to get nodes, and your Keeps report in. Scale a Deployment, roll out a new image, roll back a bad one, or write your own manifests in YAML and apply them.

Under the story runs a simulation of Kubernetes, pinned to version 1.37, and where the story bends a rule, the game says exactly how. Kelsey Hightower's Kubernetes The Hard Way takes the long route on purpose. This is the other one.

Who it is for

Strategy and idle-game players who like a town that hums, engineers who want to see whether a game can get Kubernetes right, and anyone who wants to learn Kubernetes without a manual. You do not need to know what a Pod is. You will.

The free demo

The demo is free. It holds the first two Ages, the Dark Age and the Feudal Age (Dev and Staging): from the first box carried by hand to a realm with its own control plane, War Horns and a Rush Tide to weather. The full release adds the Castle Age and the Age of Empire (UAT and Production), workshops and custom-item quests.

Kubernites is in development without enough playtest so expect rough edges. Nothing should stop you from playing, but it is unpolished. If something confuses you, breaks, or feels slow, please say so in the comments: every report shapes the next update.

Controls

• Mouse to play. Right click or Esc: back
• WASD, arrow keys or drag: pan. Mouse wheel: zoom. Space: pause
• Tab: glide to the worst alert. Enter: the Speaking Stone (optional)

System requirements

• macOS: 12 or newer, on Apple Silicon (M1 or later). About 55 MB of disk
• Windows: 10 or newer, 64-bit, with DirectX 11 or OpenGL graphics. About 45 MB of disk
• Linux: 64-bit on x86-64, with X11 or XWayland and OpenGL. About 40 MB of disk