Best Kubernetes GUI clients in 2022: kube-dashboard, Lens, Octant and kubenav

Kubernetes is one of the leading standards on container orchestration platforms since recent years. And every Kubernetes System Administrators are familiar with its command-line client, kubectl . I was a fan of it for a few years. Even though it is so powerful, it is hard to use it to understand the cluster entirely without interactive UI and data visualization.

At the same time, the learning curve of kubectl may stop every junior developer from adopting Kubernetes, especially not everyone is very interested in memorizing every command-line statement before starting to use Kubernetes.

Hence, I am going to select some Kubernetes UI clients, with some of my own selection criteria (although not every selected client covers all).

• Easy-to-use
  Make sure it is not hard to use, even for a newcomer, since Kubernetes concept itself is already not a simple one.
• Multi-platform support
  Although my primary working environment is macOS, I am also a heavy Ubuntu / ChromeOS user. I prefer a tool that can be running on multiple platforms.
• Resources YAML manifests viewing (and editing)
• Pod Log viewing (and command execution)
• Cluster Metric support (Prometheus Stats)
• CRD (custom resource definition) support
  Nowadays the community extends Kubernetes via Operator framework (see OperatorHub) and those implementations require…