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About Ratatosk

This page explains what Ratatosk does and the principles behind it.

Open source projects in the Kubernetes ecosystem release often. Most releases are safe to let pass, but every so often a security fix or a breaking change slips quietly into a minor version. Miss the wrong one, and an upgrade breaks something in production.

Ratatosk reads those release notes for you. It collects releases from the projects in the CNCF landscape (current list at /projects) every hour, analyzes them, and surfaces only what needs action.

How it works

  1. Collect: fetches each project's official release notes every hour. When a release note has no body and is just a one-line link to another document, Ratatosk follows the link and pulls in the referenced text before analysis.
  2. Extract: uses AI to extract verifiable changes (Understanding the data) from the notes. Every change carries a verbatim quote and a source URL, so it can always be verified against the original.
  3. Deliver: the same data goes to people as summaries in three languages (English, Korean, Japanese) over web, email, and RSS, and to agents over the REST API and MCP.

Principles

  • Quiet when nothing needs action. A release that was read and had nothing notable stays recorded as "reviewed, nothing notable". Ratatosk never sends an alert simply to have something to send.
  • Verifiable against the source. Every analysis links to its source. When a release note is too short to analyze, Ratatosk says so and shows the original as is.
  • You choose how much to reveal. The versions you run can be sensitive information, so Ratatosk gives you a range: never send a version to the server at all, or send them and let the server do the work. The self-hosted MCP's version comparison (check_stack) is structured so versions never leave your infrastructure; the hosted MCP and the convenience API receive versions, and those versions stay in memory for the duration of the request and are never recorded. The full comparison is in MCP server.

About the name

Ratatoskr is the squirrel of Norse myth that runs up and down the world tree Yggdrasil carrying messages. Ratatosk does the same job; the news it carries is releases.

Data and usage

Analyses are AI-generated and provided without warranty. Verify important decisions against the source link included with every analysis. See the terms of service and the privacy policy for details.

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