crobby/norman

Norman is a toolkit for building APIs that sit on top of Kubernetes. If you're managing infrastructure or building tools that need to work with Kubernetes, this gives you a way to create custom APIs without building everything from scratch. Here's the practical scenario: Kubernetes lets you define custom resources, think of them as new types of objects you can store and manage. Norman takes those custom resources and automatically generates a web API around them. So instead of manually coding HTTP endpoints, you describe what your resource should look like, and Norman handles turning it into a proper API that other tools and applications can talk to. This matters because many teams want to build their own abstractions on top of Kubernetes, and Norman removes a lot of the boilerplate work. The framework was built by Rancher Labs (a company that specializes in Kubernetes management) and follows their specific API design patterns. It's designed for teams who are already deep in the Kubernetes ecosystem and want to extend it with custom functionality. For example, if you're building a platform or control plane on top of Kubernetes, you might use Norman to expose your infrastructure choices as APIs that developers can consume. The README is minimal and points to a skeleton project (go-skel) for concrete examples of how to build with it. If you're considering this, you'd want to check that example project to see whether the approach fits what you're trying to build. It's a specialized tool for a specific use case, rather than a general-purpose API framework.