[Sandbox] Cruise

[NucleoFusion]

Project summary

Cruise is a powerful, intuitive, and fully-featured TUI (Terminal User Interface) for managing containers.

Project description

Ever felt that CLI's for containerization tools are too lengthy or limited? Find yourself executing commands again and again for simple things? Wrote multiline commands just for a typo to ruin it? Well... Fret no more. Cruise - Is a TUI Container Management Client, fitting easily in your terminal-first dev workflow, while making repetitive work easy and interactive.

How is cruise different from existing solutions?

Existing applications are limited in what they do, they serve as mostly a monitoring service, not a management service let alone a Client.

With Cruise you can:

• Manage Lifecycles of Containers, Images, Volumes, Networks.
• Have a centralized Monitoring service
• Scan images for vulnerabilities
• Get Detailed view on Docker Artifacts
• and more to come!

NOTE: Although cruise currently only supports docker, through some more refactor and expansion we plan to expand the scope of cruise to support multiple containerization tools and also several other QoL features.

Org repo URL (provide if all repos under the org are in scope of the application)

https://github.com/cruise-org

Project repo URL in scope of application

https://github.com/cruise-org/cruise

Additional repos in scope of the application

No response

Website URL

https://cruise-org.github.io/cruise/

Roadmap

https://github.com/cruise-org/cruise/blob/main/ROADMAP.md

Roadmap context

We aim to bridge the gaps left by standard CLIs and GUIs, Cruise aims for cloud-native and local container operations for everyone, anywhere. By breaking the CLI barriers by enabling batch operations, visual dashboards, actionable monitoring, and seamless remote management creating a perfect management tool.

Contributing guide

https://github.com/cruise-org/cruise/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md

Code of Conduct (CoC)

https://github.com/cruise-org/cruise/blob/main/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md

Adopters

No response

Maintainers file

https://github.com/cruise-org/cruise/blob/main/MAINTAINERS.md

Security policy file

https://github.com/cruise-org/cruise/blob/main/SECURITY.md

Standard or specification?

N/A

Business product or service to project separation

This project is unrelated to any product or service

Why CNCF?

The CNCF Foundation is the holy grail for all cloud-native Open Source projects. Although CNCF offers multitude of benefits, as the creator of Cruise, I want cruise to do its intended purpose, to help developers save time and optimize their workflow. CNCF offers access to support and adoption with its global reach and also other things such as feedback and collaboration from its ever growing community. With CNCF I aim to take Cruise to as many people as possible and ensure that the gem Cruise is, doesn't go unnoticed.

Benefit to the landscape

Adding Cruise to the CNCF landscape will provide a much needed, terminal-first, multi-runtime container management tool for optimizing workflows. Most existing CNCF projects focus on orchestration (Kubernetes), registries (Harbor), or security (Trivy/Grype), but there is no CNCF project that offers a unified, extensible TUI for managing containers, images, networks, and volumes across multiple runtimes.

Cruise’s differentiator is its terminal-first approach, which allows developers to:

• Manage containers and workflows efficiently without switching between multiple CLI tools or GUIs.

• Visualize and troubleshoot container operations, dependencies, and logs in a single interface.

• and more...

By complementing existing CNCF projects Cruise improves accessibility for users who prefer or require terminal-based workflows. This fills a gap in the cloud-native ecosystem, especially for developers and teams working in remote environments.

Cloud native 'fit'

Cruise is designed for Cloud First Approach, I mean, what is better than a TUI for a cloud environment? Nowadays, containers are everywhere, even apart from deployment, even I use some for running local applications and development. And oftentimes I have felt frustrated and limited by the interaction capability of these runtimes, simpler tasks work fine, but I often found myself searching for niche commands, or writing a lot of chains etc. Cruise solves this. Cruise is built for speed and modularity to provide an easier more efficient way to interact with container runtimes.

Cloud native 'integration'

Cruise is built to be Integration-first, although it currently supports Docker, it is as easy as building a runtime Interface to integrate a different runtime. This allows Cruise to reach as many people and organizations as possible.
In the future, through the compose support and other tool integrations, the vision is for Cruise to go beyond a standard Container Management Tool.

Cloud native overlap

Some of Cruise's features overlap with several projects such as vulnerability scanning, artifact management and more. However, Cruise offers a unique solution to manage these capabilities via a Terminal UI. This complements existing projects rather than overlapping them and has room for immense growth alongside the Cloud Native Ecosystem

Similar projects

As per my knowledge there seem to be no existing CNCF projects that offer a terminal-based, multi-runtime container management tool focused on operational workflows beyond Kubernetes. The closest is K9s, which is focused exclusively on Kubernetes resource management via TUI. Podman Desktop offers a graphical desktop manager (not a TUI) for containers but is not a CNCF project and targets a different workflow.

Landscape

No

Trademark and accounts

• If the project is accepted, I agree to donate all project trademarks and accounts to the CNCF

IP policy

• If the project is accepted, I agree the project will follow the CNCF IP Policy

Will the project require a license exception?

N/A

Project "Domain Technical Review"

No response

Application contact email(s)

lakshit.singh.mail@gmail.com

Contributing or sponsoring entity signatory information

If an organization:

Name	Address	Type (e.g., Delaware corporation)	Signatory name and title	Email address

Or, if an individual or individual(s):

Name	Country	Email address
Lakshit Singh	India	lakshit.singh.mail@gmail.com

CNCF contacts

No response

Additional information

I have two clarifications to make regarding the activity on the project.

1. For the past month or two I have had examinations so I was unable to interact much. (I am now getting active again)
2. Currently we support Docker Container, & Compose (throught a Draft PR) but through plugin support and other architecture changes we plan to introduce official support for other runtimes.

[krook]

Hi @NucleoFusion can you please provide the signatory contact information (org or individual). We won't be able to generate a draft Contribution Agreement without that info.

[NucleoFusion]

Hi @NucleoFusion can you please provide the signatory contact information (org or individual). We won't be able to generate a draft Contribution Agreement without that info.

Done!
My bad seems I missed that field.

[rochaporto]

@NucleoFusion the CNCF TOC reviewed the application during the sandbox review of 16th December 2025 (recording will be available soon).

The following points were raised by TOC:

• Recognizes the relevance and value of the project to members of the cloud native community
• Considers the project to be a better fit for the upcoming toolbox category, instead of sandbox

The TOC recommends reapplying to the CNCF in 6 to 12 months, once the new category will be in place. This will also allow the project to work on further growing its community and increasing adoption.

[NucleoFusion]

@rochaporto Thanks for the review!
I will keep working and expanding the project in the meantime, Thanks a lot
Do you know how I could keep up with the details on the toolbox category?

[rochaporto]

@rochaporto Thanks for the review! I will keep working and expanding the project in the meantime, Thanks a lot Do you know how I could keep up with the details on the toolbox category?

There will be news and a dedicated tracker from the TOC soon, we'll update this issue with a pointer.