kops is a Kubernetes cluster provisioner and lifecycle manager designed to automate the creation, maintenance, and destruction of production-grade clusters on cloud infrastructure. It functions as a declarative infrastructure manager, synchronizing the live state of a cluster with versioned manifests stored in remote object storage to ensure idempotent operations.
The project distinguishes itself by offering comprehensive automation for the entire cluster lifecycle, including high-availability control plane deployment, incremental rolling updates, and automated version upgrades. It also serves as an infrastructure-as-code exporter, capable of generating Terraform configurations from the current state of a deployed cluster.
Beyond provisioning, it covers a broad operational surface including automated node and pod scaling, etcd data store management, and complex networking configurations such as dual-stack IPv6 and CNI integration. It also manages identity and security through OIDC authentication integration, cloud IAM role mapping, and x509 certificate lifecycle management.
The tool provides a command-line interface with support for shell autocompletion.