Highlights –

  • The latest update will give cloud-native developers and others access to a managed development cluster tailored for software development needs.

The access to the development cluster is optimized for specific software development needs. Kubernetes, the container orchestration program of choice, has many features to its kitty. However, one thing that it lacks is “easy.” It’s infamous for the most common feature: Complexity.

Mirantis’s Integrated Development Environment (IDE), the famous open-source lens, makes programming with Kubernetes simpler. In the latest preview, the firm has made it easier by allowing one to manage their own private Kubernetes development cluster.

This can be done directly from the Lens Desktop Application via the integrated Lens Spaces cloud-based service. There is direct access to the development cluster optimized for specific software development needs. Since a lot of Kubernetes work is being done on clusters, this will prove to be of great help.

Even before the Cloud Native feature was bundled in, the lens was already famous. It has been downloaded five million times and has 17,000 GitHub stars. With this Lens, which was simply an IED (a helpful one), it will become a complete Kubernetes development platform.

Lens 5.4 comes with the following new features:

Offload Local Cluster: Stop working on a resource-constrained local machine, transition Kubernetes development work to the cloud, and access from Lens Spaces.

Save Resources: Make sure that the resources for the operating system are highly available and accessible for crucial projects.

Intelligent Auto-Shutdown: Managed development clusters will make it easy to identify inactivity and auto-shutdown to avoid extra costs, reducing large public cloud provider bills.

Standardized Setup: Experience quick onboarding of teams. Additionally, applications can be created in a standardized Kubernetes development environment, thus ensuring transferability to a production environment.

The Lens update is open-source software and is available now.

Experts’ view

When asked why the lens has so many fans? John Jainschigg, Senior Technical Marketing at Mirantis, recently observed, “Using Kubernetes means interacting with clusters using command-line interfaces (CLI) that consume and retrieve files — many, many files, in many contexts… Doing all this straight from the command line is difficult, error-prone, and slow.”

“The current version of Lens vastly improves the quality of life for developers and operators managing multiple clusters,” he explained.

Miska Kaipiainen, Mirantis’s VP of engineering, said, “With over 500,000 Lens users, the developer clusters feature is now fully implemented with Lens 5.4.” It is, however, still a work in progress.

Kaipiainen concluded, “It’s possible some corner cases may need ironing and some scaling issues may present themselves, hence the label’ tech preview.”