Operating AI/ML Workloads on Kubernetes: A Headlamp Plugin for Kubeflow

The Headlamp Kubeflow plugin is a new Kubernetes UI extension that surfaces Kubeflow's custom resources (Notebooks, Pipelines, Katib, Training, Spark) directly inside Headlamp, a general-purpose Kubernetes web UI. It addresses a common pain point for cluster operators and SREs who must switch between ML-specific dashboards and kubectl to diagnose issues at the Pod level. The plugin reads directly from the Kubernetes API server, showing Pod conditions, failure reasons, resource states, and cross-namespace views without requiring the Kubeflow backend services to be running. It also provides a graph map of ML resources with owner-reference edges. The post frames this as a reusable pattern for any CRD-heavy platform.