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Pluto

Pluto is an Apache-2.0 CLI from Fairwinds that finds deprecated and removed Kubernetes apiVersions in manifests, Helm releases and live clusters before upgrades.

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Introduction

Pluto is a CLI tool that helps discover deprecated apiVersions in Kubernetes. When Kubernetes removes an API version, manifests that still use it fail to apply after a cluster upgrade, and Helm releases that were deployed with it can become hard to upgrade. Pluto finds those references ahead of time.

It scans static files in a directory, Helm releases stored in a cluster, and live API resources, and reports each deprecated or removed version along with its replacement and the Kubernetes version that removes it. You can target a version with --target-versions so the report matches the upgrade you are planning.

In the quality loop, Pluto is a release check before cluster upgrades and a CI guard that stops new manifests from using deprecated APIs.

The source code is at FairwindsOps/pluto on GitHub under the Apache-2.0 licence, with about 2,600 stars; the most recent commit was on 6 November 2026.

Features

  1. File scanning: Detect deprecated APIs in manifests on disk.
  2. Helm release scanning: Check releases stored in a cluster.
  3. Target versions: Report against the Kubernetes version you are upgrading to.
  4. Replacement hints: Shows the API version to migrate to.
  5. CI exit codes: Fail builds on deprecated or removed APIs.
  6. Output formats: Wide, JSON, YAML and Markdown.

Pros

  1. Upgrade safety: Turns surprise upgrade failures into planned work.
  2. Free to use: Open source under the Apache-2.0 licence, so the core tool costs nothing to use.
  3. Actively maintained: The repository had commits as recent as 6 November 2026.

Cons

  1. Narrow scope: Only checks API versions.
  2. Data updates: Deprecation data must be kept current by upgrading Pluto.
  3. No auto-fix: You still edit manifests yourself.
pluto detect-files -d k8s/ --target-versions k8s=v1.34.0
pluto detect-helm -owide

Resources:

Pricing

Pluto is free and open source under the Apache-2.0 licence.

  1. Cluster operators planning Kubernetes upgrades.
  2. CI pipelines that should reject deprecated APIs.

Conclusion

Pluto answers one important question well: what will break when we upgrade Kubernetes?

Run it in CI and before every cluster upgrade.

On CheckOps, Pluto is filed under the Release & CI gates and Production monitoring & observability stages. Related tools listed here include KUTTL, Chainsaw, kind, helm-unittest, chart-testing and kubeconform. When comparing them, weigh the licence, the languages and platforms each supports, whether it is self-hosted or managed, and how cleanly it slots into your existing CI pipeline. Details on this page were checked against the official website, documentation and repository on 11 November 2026.

Alternatives

Other tools on CheckOps that cover similar ground. Open a page, or compare one with Pluto side by side.