Lens 4.0 Released

It was March 2020 when we open sourced Lens — the Kubernetes IDE. Today, 570 commits and 502 closed issues later, we are proud to release Lens 4.0. It is a major milestone for us, as well as for the users who have embraced Lens.

The highlight of this new release is the Extensions API that will allow extension authors to plug-in directly to the Lens UI, add visualizations and functionality, and integrate with technologies and services around Kubernetes. With the help of extensions, Lens becomes the easiest and best way to consume any technologies in the cloud native ecosystem.

Even before reaching 4.0, Lens has been broadly adopted by the Kubernetes community and cloud native ecosystem at large. Lens has been downloaded over 1.3 million times, and we have received close to 10,000 stars on GitHub. Roughly 100,000 users across the globe currently use lens. These users are using Lens because it provides the full situational awareness for everything that runs in Kubernetes. It’s lowering the entry barrier for people just getting started and radically improving productivity (and quality of life) for people with more experience.

Lens IDE — The Kubernetes IDE Feature Highlights

With today’s 4.0 release, we want to take the next step and extend Lens from being the go-to IDE for working with Kubernetes primitives, to become a system to harness the full spectrum of cloud native technologies. We hope you enjoy it! See additional details of the Lens 4.0 key features below or take a look at the full changelog. Get started from here.

Lens Extensions

Lens 4.0 features Extensions API that may be used by the community and cloud native ecosystem vendors to develop Lens Extensions. Also, organizations may leverage the Extensions API to develop their own proprietary features to enrich the Lens UI with information and functionality important for their specific use cases. Ready-made extensions may be easily consumed from the Lens IDE.

Lens Extension for Starboard by Aqua Security

Lens Extensions are developed in TypeScript and packaged as NPM packages. To support the development of Lens Extensions, we have opened a Lens documentation site with instructions on how to get started and a full API reference.

Over the past few months, we have been contacted by and worked with several cloud native ecosystem vendors to refine the Extensions API and its capabilities. Some of these vendors have already published their first extensions to be used with Lens. See the list of currently available extensions and expect to see many, many more extensions to be added in the coming weeks and months!

Improved Logs Interface

Bye-bye modal dialog, say hello to massively improved logs interface! This is another great feature of Lens 4.0. Previously, the logs interface was not very practical because it was implemented as a modal dialog. Now, you don’t have to interrupt your work while inspecting logs.

We also added support for colors, search, and many other improvements. In the coming releases, we’ll be adding filtering plus some other enhancements to improve developer happiness even more. Stay tuned!

Other Changes

Lens 4.0 is a monumental release, so not all features may be discussed in detail, but here’s the list of other changes that are visible to Lens users:

• Mechanism for users to specify accessible namespaces
• Tray icon
• Add last-status information for container
• Add LoadBalancer information to Ingress view
• Add search by IP to Pod view
• Move tracker to an extension
• Ability to restart deployment
• Add stateful set scale slider
• Status bar visual fixes
• Add +/- buttons in scale deployment popup screen
• Update chart details when selecting another chart
• Use the latest alpine version (3.12) for shell sessions
• Open last active cluster after switching workspaces
• Replace deprecated stable helm repository with bitnami
• Catch errors return error response when fetching chart or chart values fails
• Update EULA URL
• Change add-cluster to single-column layout
• Replace cluster warning event polling with watches
• Fix pod usage metrics on Kubernetes >=1.19
• Fix proxy upgrade socket timeouts
• Fix UI staleness after network issues
• Fix errors on app quit
• Fix Kube-auth-proxy to accept only target cluster hostname

See the full changelog on GitHub.

Community Updates

Here you’ll find recent updates from the Lens Community:

• We have opened an official Lens Community Blog on Medium! We’ll be posting project updates and other community-related articles in there. We are also looking for contributors to write about Lens: if you are writing a story about Lens, we’d love to share your post via Lens Community blog. Please contact us if you are interested!
• As the Lens community grows, managing issues and feedback is taking more and more of our time. Learn how we are planning to tackle these issues.
• We have agreed to share Lens IDE slack with our friends from k0s “The Zero Friction Kubernetes” open source project. You’ll find their community discussion on k0s channel.

About Lens

Lens provides the full situational awareness for everything that runs in Kubernetes. It’s lowering the barrier of entry for people just getting started and radically improving productivity for people with more experience. Lens is 100% open source and free of charge for any purpose.

The Lens open source project is backed by a number of Kubernetes and cloud native ecosystem pioneers. With over 1.3 million downloads, close to 100,000 users, and 10,000 stars on GitHub, it’s the most popular IDE for Kubernetes. https://k8slens.dev