YAKD: Yet Another Kubernetes Dashboard

No, YAKD is not a new Kubernetes Dashboard project, but that could be a good name for a new Kubernetes Dashboard application.

The purpose of this post is to list some existing dashboard projects. The number of dashboards seems to be increasing each day, although some projects listed below already meet all the requirements of a dashboard application.

A dashboard is a web-based Kubernetes user interface. The main purpose of a dashboard is to manage the life cycle of containerized applications deployed in a Kubernetes cluster. Fortunately, a dashboard comes with other benefits to make any operations on a cluster easier like troubleshooting a containerized application, and managing the cluster resources.

The main benefits of a dashboard are to get an overview of applications running on a remote cluster, and create or modify individual Kubernetes resources, like scaling a Deployment, initiate a rolling update, restart a pod or deploy new applications using a deploy wizard.

Basically, a dashboard provides information on the state of a Kubernetes cluster and its resources, and potential errors that may have occurred.

This post lists a bunch of projects. Some of these aim to be more than a simple Kubernetes Dashboard. The usage of each tool depends on the use cases. For example, someone would prefer to work with a local application rather than using a shared dashboard deployed in a Kubernetes cluster. Up to you to make your choice between these following projects.

Kubernetes Dashboard

Let’s start with the default Kubernetes Dashboard project, kube-dashboard. This dashboard is the most popular and mature Kubernetes UI client. This web UI dashboard gives an overview of containerized applications running on a remote Kubernetes cluster and the ability to manage the main Kubernetes resources like Deployment, Services, Jobs, etc.

Deployed in a Kubernetes cluster, it provides all the features an operator could expect:

• Centralized UI to manage a Kubernetes as a team.