- In current world most of the companies are moving from legacy monolith to Microservices this has led to the creation of large containerized applications.
- Handling thousands of container is a tedious task for the organization. This problem led to the evolution of Kubernetes as one of the popular container orchestration tools
- Kubernetes is a container orchestration system that lets you deploy, scale, and manage containerized applications
- Here comes the main problem we use Kubernetes tool for interacting with clusters using CLIs that consume and retrieve files in many context describing cluster, resource and application states. Managing many Kubernetes clusters perhaps across many different platforms means wrangling the additional complexity of diverse access contexts, modes, secrets and methods for reaching clusters, components, nodes and infrastructure.
- Doing all this straight from the command line is difficult, error-prone and slower here comes our life savior "Lens"
- In general we use the term "Lens" to visualize any object/thing clearly in a similar way Kubernetes lens is also used to visualize, manage and monitor the Kubernetes clusters.
- Lens is an effective, open-source IDE for Kubernetes. Lens simplifies working with Kubernetes by helping you manage and?monitor the cluster .
- It was developed by Kontena, Inc. and then acquired by Mirantis in 2020, who then open-sourced it and made it available to download for free
- In an organization managing of multiple clusters in Kubernetes is tedious task but with the Lens it simplifies the things?.
- Adding a Kubernetes cluster to Lens is easy , Go to the ?Lens webpage, download and install it for your preferred OS (windows/linux/mac), after opening the application, hit the ‘+’ button to add your cluster.
- All you need to do is point the local/online Kubeconfig file to Lens or copy paste as text then click on add cluster it automatically discovers and connects with it.
- Cluster Connection is based on the BoreD OSS software. Please check official documentation for more details?Cluster Connect.
- Lens makes multi cluster management work easy i.e. we can access and work with any number of Kubernetes clusters on any cloud, from a single unified IDE. The clusters may be local (e.g. minikube) or external (e.g., Mirantis Kubernetes Engine (formerly Docker Enterprise/UCP), EKS, AKS, GKE, Rancher, or OpenShift).?
- With Lens, you can inspect all the resources running inside your cluster, ranging from simple Pods, Deployments, Daemon set ,replicas ,config maps?and Events to the custom types added by your applications.
- It also provides real time statistics, log streams, and hands-on troubleshooting capabilities by directly connecting to the pods/container level on a single click.
- You can filter out the pods, deployments based on namespace ,age and condition (available or having some issues )
- It has built in terminal facility , Lensbsmart terminal will automatically switch the version of kubectl to match the currently selected K8S cluster API version. If an API-compatible version is not found, it will be downloaded automatically in the background.
- ?Lens does give you the option to create, update, and delete resources right from its GUI as well as from the in-built terminal, which is automatically switched to the right context
- Lens integrates with Prometheus to visualize metrics which includes CPU, Memory, Requests and allocated capacity for all the kubernetes objects created inside the cluster
- Kubernetes Lens also integrates with Helm, making it easy to install and manage Helm charts and releases in Kubernetes.
- Users can browse Helm charts, deploy them with a single click, modify configuration settings (with built-in help), explore installed Helm charts and their revision
- It also supports RBAC which means individual users connecting to Kubernetes clusters via Lens can only interact with the resources?which are they are allowed.
- Lens support multi workspace management i.e. we can organizes clusters into logical groups called workspaces. This is helpful for Developers ,DevOps and SREs who have to manage multiple (even hundreds of) clusters.
- https://k8slens.dev/
- https://lightrun.com/dev-tools/what-is-kubernetes-lens/
- https://kodekloud.com/topic/lens-introduction/
