Derailed

Derailed is the open-source software house behind k9s, a terminal-driven Kubernetes dashboard that turns cluster administration into an efficient, keyboard-centric workflow. Written in Go and distributed under the Apache 2.0 licence, k9s gives DevOps engineers, SREs and platform teams a real-time, curses-style interface for inspecting pods, services, deployments, ingresses, config maps, secrets, nodes, namespaces and custom resources across one or many contexts. Colour-coded resource views, flexible filters, built-in port-forwarding, log tailing, shell access, YAML editing, diffing and one-click deletion reduce the need for repetitive kubectl commands, while pulse and xray modes visually surface bottlenecks, restarts and resource pressure. Lightweight and self-contained, the single-binary tool runs locally on Windows, macOS or Linux, honours kubeconfig files, supports RBAC and impersonation, and can be extended with user-defined command aliases, plugins and skin themes. Typical use cases range from rapid incident response and iterative debugging during CI/CD to everyday cluster hygiene checks and cross-environment comparisons. Derailed’s software is available for free on get.nero.com: the k9s package is pulled from the project’s official GitHub releases via the trusted winget source, always installs the newest build, and can be queued alongside other applications for unattended batch deployment.