Lens vs K9s for cluster administration

Why do I need something like this?

Most of us cut our DevOps teeth on shell commands. Piping yaml and setting up port forwards using the commands given to us by the good folks at Google. Like DB admin and code authoring, a decent UI does relieve some of the stresses involved with day-to-day interaction.

Some typical use cases include:

• Checking port forwarding rules
• Scaling pods
• Checking logs
• Zooming in on namespaces

These things are definitely possible to do via the Shell. If you’re working in an IDE and you’ve just redeployed your yaml, it is definitely nice to be able to take a sneak peak without dipping into kubectl.

Maybe you’re happy with shell, if you are, then stick with it. It’s probably not in your interest.

If you like pretty UIs and drop-downs, stick around for a quick tour.

Lens

Lens is an open-sourced product that grew into a full-blown subscription product developed by Mirantis.

Lens IDE is popular among application developers. It looks and feels very much like a JetBrains product and makes Kubernetes easier to observe.

Lens is moving increasingly to a subscription-type service. Originally a fully open source product, OpenLens, the funding model for Lens means you need yet another ID and Cloud Login which I’ve no doubt will result in features locked behind subscriptions eventually.

That said, for browsing containers, checking their status, jumping into the config maps and viewing secrets, Lens is pretty easy in its current state.

Its Prometheus integration puts metrics within easy reach to view trends.

K9s

K9s is a great looking cursor style IDE for the Kubernetes. It runs in your terminal and is interactive using commands. Sometimes feels like you’re using a commodore64 to admin the cluster which is quite cool.

You can live edit the yaml files, dip into logs and view forwarding rules using keyboard shortcuts.

Now you could be forgiven for arguing on what’s the point of K9s (if you are trying to avoid shell commands). K9s certainly has its own command set but they are more succinct and designed for speed rather than utility.

Overall, a great tool for people looking to get to grips with Kubernetes and has the added cool factor of being terminal based. 

Which to use?

This is more down to personal preference. If I wanted something more graphical/IDE based, Lens is the way to go. For those with the time to learn the commands, I’d choose K9s. My go-to would be K9s as it’s super fast and less of the subscription stuff.

That said, the market for this kind of tool is pretty small so we’re lucky to have anything like this full stop. Kubernetes itself is getting more ubiquitous so most developers are skilled in Kubectl. It’s still nice to have IDEs focussed on a niche like this so hats off to the developers.