Maximizing the productivity of working with Kubernetes Environment with a tool for each persona
We all know that Kubernetes is the default environment for all our new applications we developed we will build. The flavor of that Kubernetes platform can be of different ways and forms, but one thing is clear, it is complex.
The reasons behind this complexity is being able to provide all the flexibility but it is also true that the k8s project never has put much effort to provide a simple way to manage your clusters and kubectl is the point of access to send commands leaving this door open to the community to provide its own solution and these are the things that we are going to discuss today.
Kubernetes Dashboard: The Default Option
Kubernetes Dashboard is the default option for most of the installations. It is a web-based interface that is part of the K8s project but not deployed by default when you install the cluster
K9S: The CLI option
K9S is one of the most common options for the ones that love a very powerful command-line interface with a lot of options at your disposal
It is a mix between all the power of a command-line interface with all the keyboard options at your disposals with a very fancy graphical view to have a quick overview of the status of your cluster at glance.
Lens — The Graphical Option
The lens is a very vitaminized GUI option that goes beyond that just showing the status of the K8S cluster or allowing modifications on the components. With integration with other projects such as Helm or support for the CRD. It provides a very pleasant experience of managing clusters with multi-cluster support as well. To know more about Lens you can take a look at this article that we cover its main features:
Octant — The Web Option
Octant provides an improved experience compared with the default web option discussed in this article using the Kubernetes dashboard. Built for extension with a plug-in system that allows you to extend or customize the behavior of octant to maximize your productivity managing K8S clusters. Including CRD support and graphical visualization of dependencies provides an awesome experience.
Summary
The have provided in this article different tools that will help you during the important task to manage or inspect your Kubernetes cluster. Each of them with its own characteristics and each of them focuses on different ways to provide the information (CLI, GUI and Web) so you can always find one that works best for your situation and preferences.
