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Lille, Inria, CNRS, Centrale Lille, UMR 9189 CRIStAL F-59000 Lille, France [philippe.merle@inria.fr](philippe.merle@inria.fr)  \nFabio Petrillo  \n´Ecole de technologie supe´rieure - ´ETS Montre´al Montre´al, Canada [fabio.petrillo@etsmtl.ca](fabio.petrillo@etsmtl.ca)  \narXiv :2505 .22879v1 [ cs . SE] 28 May 2025  \nAbstract—Modern distributed applications increasingly rely on cloud-native platforms to abstract the complexity of deployment and scalability. As the de facto orchestration standard, Kubernetes enables this abstraction, but its declarative configuration model makes the architectural understanding difficult. Developers, operators, and architects struggle to form accurate mental models from raw manifests, Helm charts, or cluster state descriptions. We introduce KubeDiagrams, an open-source tool that transforms Kubernetes manifests into architecture diagrams. By grounding our design in a user-centered study of real-world visualization practices, we identify the specific challenges Kubernetes users face and map these to concrete design requirements. KubeDiagrams integrates seamlessly with standard Kubernetes artifacts, preserves semantic fidelity to core concepts, and supports extensibility and automation. We detail the tool’s architecture, visual encoding strategies, and extensibility mechanisms. Three case studies illustrate how KubeDiagrams enhances system comprehension and supports architectural reasoning in distributed cloud-native systems. KubeDiagrams addresses concrete pain points in Kubernetes-based DevOps practices and is valued for its automation, clarity, and low-friction integration into real-world tooling environments.  \nIndex Terms—Architectural diagrams, Cloud-native, Kubernetes, KubeDiagrams  \nI. INTRODUCTION  \nCloud-native applications are engineered to fully exploit modern cloud computing environments by adhering to scalability, elasticity, resilience, and continuous delivery principles. Built as collections of loosely coupled microservices, these applications are typically containerized and orchestrated using platforms like Kubernetes. Central to this ecosystem, Kubernetes has transformed how cloud-native applications are deployed and managed. By offering a declarative model for infrastructure through YAML manifests, Kubernetes simplifies many operational tasks while introducing its own layer of abstraction and complexity. As systems grow in size and heterogeneity, comprehending the architecture of Kubernetesmanaged applications becomes increasingly challenging.  \nDevOps engineers use manual diagramming tools such as [Draw.io](Draw.io) or Lucidchart to visualize their cluster architectures. However, the fast-paced evolution of microservices and infrastructure in Kubernetes environments makes these static diagrams quickly outdated and error-prone. The gap between live system state and visual documentation often results in confusion, miscommunication, and reduced situational awareness.  \nMoreover, manually navigating YAML manifests, Helm charts, or kubectl outputs across namespaces imposes a high cognitive load and hinders adequate system comprehension.  \nIn this paper, we introduce KubeDiagrams, an opensource tool that automates the generation of architecture diagrams directly from Kubernetes cluster states or declarative configurations. It bridges the gap between deployment reality and visual documentation, providing a lightweight yet powerful solution for system understanding.  \nKubeDiagrams automates the generation of up-to-date, semantically rich architecture diagrams from live cluster states or declarative configurations such as YAML manifests, Helm charts, and Kustomize files. KubeDiagrams offers a scriptable, low-friction solution that integrates directly into DevOps workflows, continuously aligning system documentation with actual deployment states. It supports over 47 Kubernetes resource kinds (including custom r","cbCaid6LheG6fa9y","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaid6LheG6fa9y","pdf",2270159,11,"English","# Introduction\n# The KubeDiagrams Tool\n## Architecture and functionality\n# Case studies and use cases\n# Comparison with existing tools\n# Practitioner feedback\n# Limitations\n# Conclusion and future work","[{\"question\":\"Why is Kubernetes architecture difficult to understand from existing artifacts?\",\"answer\":\"Kubernetes uses a declarative YAML model, and teams must interpret raw manifests, Helm charts, or cluster state descriptions. This creates a gap between live system state and documentation, increasing cognitive load and leading to outdated or error-prone understanding.\"},{\"question\":\"What does KubeDiagrams do?\",\"answer\":\"KubeDiagrams transforms Kubernetes manifests and live cluster states into architecture diagrams. It produces up-to-date, semantically rich diagrams and integrates into DevOps workflows.\"},{\"question\":\"How does KubeDiagrams integrate with common Kubernetes and DevOps practices?\",\"answer\":\"It supports standard Kubernetes artifacts such as YAML manifests, Helm charts, and Kustomize files, and it is designed to be scriptable for automation. It also aligns documentation with actual deployment states and fits CI/CD pipelines.\"}]","Visualizing Cloud-native Applications with KubeDiagrams | PDF",1792967456,28]