Hello HackerNews. Fawad (@fawadkhaliq) and I are co-founders at Chkk (https://www.chkk.io/). We built a tool to make upgrades of Kubernetes and open-source projects (like Istio, Kafka, Postgres, Keycloak, Vault, …) safer and less painful by generating a machine-verified plan before you touch dev, staging or prod. If you've ever delayed upgrades because the unknowns felt too risky or coordination felt too heavy, Chkk is built to help with that.

Upgrades get delayed across teams, not from fear of work but because the work never lands. Feature deadlines win. No one wants to risk prod. Dependencies on app teams introduce friction. Even known steps turn into risky, slow, custom toil.

We don’t believe Kubernetes LTS (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38516717) is the answer, as AWS, GCP and AKS are charging 6x more for extended / long-term support of clusters not upgraded in time. Forced upgrades are also being threatened, with GKE even enforcing them.

We built Chkk so platform teams can upgrade safely and each team doesn’t have to repeat the same toil over and over again.

Chkk talks to your cluster via a CLI and generates an Upgrade Assessment, which flags outdated versions, deprecated APIs, misconfigured PDBs, what you need to upgrade, and recommends the next version that your open-source projects should upgrade to.

From that it creates a tailored Upgrade Plan - a safe, ordered workflow combining breaking changes, CRD diffs, Helm values changes and readiness checks.

We cover EKS, GKE, AKS, and on-prem Kubernetes flavors and also have coverage for 100s of open-source projects. We’ve been working with customers for more than a year and have seen Chkk tangibly reduce upgrade toil and catch real issues (https://www.chkk.io/blog/case-study-dexcom, https://www.chkk.io/blog/case-study-yoti). We’ve also helped customers that were years behind on their upgrades because a complex open-source component got orphaned when its owner left the company.

We have a free tier which you can try here: https://cli.chkk.io/ You can read more here: https://docs.chkk.io/overview/understanding‑chkk

We’ve worked hard to make it easy to get started. Just download our CLI and run: `chkk start`. This command walks you through login, cluster registration, then requests an Upgrade Assessment. It runs locally, no elevated permissions, free to use.

We’d love feedback, especially from people running multi‑cluster stacks and juggling upgrades under time or cost pressure. We’ll be in the thread all day—ask us anything.