Things we built because we could.
Free tools from the Portainer engineering team. Each one solves a real problem we kept running into. None of them are on the product roadmap. All of them are open source.
Platform engineering teams are increasingly running shared Kubernetes clusters, but most application developers still think in Docker. D2K bridges that gap. It presents a synthetic Docker API endpoint that translates incoming Docker CLI commands and API calls into the equivalent Kubernetes operations on a shared cluster... letting developers work exactly as they always have, without touching a kubeconfig.
The result is a clean separation: developers get the Docker workflow they know, platform teams keep full Kubernetes control. No retooling of CI pipelines. No Kubernetes training for every developer on the floor.
Developers who have used Google Cloud Run know the experience: point at a container image, get a URL, done. Portainer Run delivers that same screen-by-screen workflow, self-hosted on your own Kubernetes cluster via the Portainer API. No Google account. No egress costs. No data leaving your infrastructure perimeter.
It's not a wrapper around Cloud Run. It's a UI that replicates that serverless container experience using Kubernetes primitives under the covers... giving internal developers the simplicity of a managed cloud platform without the dependency on one.
Portainer's web UI works in a mobile browser, but that's not the same as a native app. Krill is a native iOS and Android application for Portainer... built for engineers who are on call, on the factory floor, or just away from a desk when something needs attention.
Connect to any Portainer instance, monitor environment health, inspect containers and stacks, and take action when you need to. The same Portainer API that powers the web UI powers Krill. Everything you can see in the browser, you can see on your phone.
The question was straightforward: why does running a single-node Kubernetes cluster still require so much operational ceremony? K3s, K0s, MicroK8s all work, but none were built with the Portainer operator in mind. KubeSolo is a single-node Kubernetes distribution built specifically for edge, IoT, and resource-constrained environments, and packaged to integrate natively with Portainer from day one.
It ships as a single binary. No kubeadm, no etcd cluster, no control-plane setup. Just Kubernetes on a single node, managed through Portainer. What started as a Skunkworks experiment to answer one question became a standalone project with its own community and a clear roadmap.
We're building more.
If you're using one of these tools, or have a problem you think we should take a look at, we want to hear about it. The best Skunkworks projects start with a real operational problem nobody has properly solved.