kubernetes-sigs/kwok

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

3177 stars · 248 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

KWOK (Kubernetes WithOut Kubelet) is a toolkit for simulating Kubernetes clusters with thousands of fake nodes and pods at very low resource cost. It provides `kwok` for simulating node/pod lifecycles and `kwokctl` for creating and managing simulated clusters.

Use cases

• simulate thousands of kubernetes nodes on a laptop
• test kubernetes schedulers and autoscalers at scale
• create fast throwaway kubernetes clusters for CI
• test kubernetes controllers without real workloads
• benchmark cluster performance with many fake pods
• learn kubernetes without provisioning real machines

When to choose

• you need large-scale node/pod simulation with minimal CPU and memory
• you want instant cluster creation/deletion for testing scheduling or autoscaling
• you need a kind alternative when pods don't need to actually run
• you want kubectl/helm-compatible clusters for tooling tests

When to avoid

• you need to actually run real containerized workloads and reach them over the network
• you need exact kubelet behavior fidelity (consider kubemark)
• you need a production cluster

Facets

cli-tool · maturity active

simulation developer-tools testing cli container-runtime developer-tools microservices windows cli cross-platform go kubernetes cluster-simulation fake-nodes kubelet-simulation scheduling-testing autoscaling-testing kwokctl lightweight multi-cluster ci-testing containers devops linux macos docker

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markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="kubernetes-sigs/kwok")