Lens Integration with Mirantis Container Cloud 2.9
With this week's release of Mirantis Container Cloud 2.9, I'd like to take a moment to highlight some new, exciting, time-saving features. Container Cloud now integrates seamlessly with Lens, allowing you to open your clusters in Lens with a single click!
Container Cloud Lens extension
You may already be aware of our open source Container Cloud Lens extension. We built this extension to enable Lens, the Kubernetes IDE, to connect to any Container Cloud instance and make it quick and easy for you to add your clusters to Lens for further inspection and monitoring.
Last April, we released Lens 4.2, and introduced a new `lens:` Protocol Handler to enable powerful new types of integrations between applications (even those running in a browser) and Lens. With this feature, a request to `lens://extensions/@mirantis/lens-extension-cc/activateCluster?clusterId=123`, for example, could allow our Container Cloud extension to open the specified cluster in Lens simply by clicking on a button in the Container Cloud web application UI running in the browser.
With these new capabilities available to us, we decided to enhance our Container Cloud web application UI, and our Container Cloud Lens extension, to begin taking advantage of the Lens Protocol Handler.
New integrations
The 2.9 release of Mirantis Container Cloud provides the following new integration points with Lens:
- Add a cluster to Lens
- Open a cluster in Lens
These integrations are made possible thanks to the enhancements we made to our extension to enable them. You can go deeper into the types of protocol requests our extension supports here.
Adding a cluster
Before this new feature, adding a Container Cloud cluster to Lens required you to first generate the kubeconfig file, download it to a local directory, open Lens, and use Lens features to find that file and add your cluster to Lens.
If you were using our Container Cloud extension, then the process was somewhat easier because we saved you several steps, but you still had to do this outside the Container Cloud web application UI, and out of your current work context with Container Cloud. You also had to know your instance URL and then find your clusters in a potentially long list of clusters across all your projects.
Now, the process is greatly simplified: All you need to do, when you decide you want to inspect a cluster using Lens, is choose the new "Add cluster to Lens" action from the cluster's extended menu, and Container Cloud will work with our extension to add that cluster to Lens and activate it, all in just a few simple clicks, and without losing your work context.
Opening a cluster
Once you have added one of your Container Cloud clusters to Lens, it's now really easy to activate it in Lens, right from the web application UI.
You no longer need to leave the browser on your own, open Lens, and go searching for your cluster by name, project, or some other aspect. All you need to do is click "Open cluster in Lens" from Container Cloud to open it.
Opening a cluster in Lens is similar to adding it, except adding it is really a single click since the kubeconfig doesn't need to be generated, and therefore authorization tokens don't have to be generated either.
More possibilities
Mirantis Container Cloud 2.9, the Container Cloud Lens extension 3.0, and Lens combine to create a powerful set of new time saving tools for every day tasks related to managing and monitoring your clusters with our new integration features.
There are certainly more possibilities, and we would love to hear your ideas on how we can improve your daily workflows from any of those angles. Please leave us a comment with your thoughts and feedback!
If you'd like to test drive the Mirantis Container Cloud and Lens integration, here are the links:
