Lens, the world’s most popular Kubernetes IDE, has found a new home at Mirantis

August 13, 2020

Nick Chase

As you may have heard, Mirantis will oversee development of the open source Lens Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for Kubernetes. Lens brings multi-cluster management into the mainstream and simplifies the experience for developers working with Kubernetes and cloud-native applications. Lens is quickly becoming a Big Deal(TM). Available on Github under the MIT license, Lens has seen blistering widespread adoption since its launch as an open source project this past March. With a growing community of 40,000+ users and 7,300+ stargazers on GitHub, it is already one of the top trending open source projects in the cloud-native ecosystem. (According to publicly available data, some of the largest companies in the world are using Lens Kubernetes IDE to accelerate their Kubernetes efforts at scale, including Apple, Rakuten, Zendesk, TIM, and Adobe.)So what’s the big fuss? Kubernetes has a dashboard, right? Well, yes, but it’s not really designed to give you the functionality that Lens does, including:

Multi-Cluster management on any cloud, whether local (e.g. minikube, Docker Desktop) or external (e.g. Mirantis Cloud Native Platform (formerly Docker Enterprise), EKS, AKS, GKE, Rancher, or OpenShift). Simply import the kubeconfig file. You can even group clusters into workspaces.
Immediate situational awareness in context, with a context-aware terminal, built-in Prometheus stats, and comprehensive logging that lets you look at all layers in the stack. Imagine being able to see a pod’s logs without having to jump through a million hoops!
Context-aware terminal includes a version of kubectl that is always API-compatible with your cluster and in the right context, even as you switch from one cluster to another.
Built-In Prometheus stats enable you to see real-time graphs and resource utilization charts integrated into the dashboard, always in the right context.

That’s a lot of words. Let’s see what Lens actually looks like: