Lens 4.1 Released

Published in

k8slens

5 min readFeb 16, 2021

Today we are proud to release Lens 4.1 which includes many new and exciting features, including some much-needed enhancements and bug fixes! The highlights of this release are the all new command palette, custom Helm repositories management, control over auto-updates, and performance improvements when working with massive production clusters.

We are quite excited about this new release and hope you’ll enjoy it! Below you will find additional details about this release. See the full changelog here. Get started with Lens today!.

Command Palette

Many Lens users have requested improved accessibility and the use of Keyboard for navigation. We have heard you! Navigating in Lens just got better. We implemented Command Palette that will allow users to perform the most common tasks like switching between workspaces or jumping into a specific cluster simply with few keyboard shortcuts.

Command Palette may be opened with “⇧⌘P” keyboard shortcut.

This is just the beginning. We’ll be adding more functionality to the commands palette over the next coming releases. We hope you enjoy it!

Custom Helm Repo Configuration

The Helm charts feature in Lens is a great way to discover and deploy new software and services. Previously, the list of available Helm chart repositories was retrieved directly from ArtifactHub and there was no possibility to add any external helm chart repositories via Lens user interface. Users of Lens had to manually add those repositories via Helm command line tool. With Lens 4.1, it is now possible to also add custom helm chart repositories right from the Lens user interface.

Custom helm chart repository configuration dialog may be accessed from Lens application Preferences.

We’d like to thank @pashevskii for contributing this great enhancement. Keep up the good work!

Prompt for Auto-updates

While auto-updates make life easier and keep you up to date with all the new features of Lens, sometimes you want to control when to update to a new version. You’ve been asking for this feature for a while and now we are delivering by first prompting you to update when there is a new version available. You can also Check for Updates in the icon tray.

Table columns configuration

Working with a smaller screen? Perhaps you only want to focus on certain information? We have enhanced all tables within Lens to allow you to select which columns are displayed by using the selector on the top right-hand corner of each table.

Performance enhancement for very large clusters

Many big organizations use Lens to work with some of the biggest clusters on this planet. These clusters may contain massive amounts of Kubernetes objects. A typical example is a shared multi-tenant cluster with hundreds of namespaces. Managing all of these namespaces in real time became a performance bottleneck and we were not happy with the sluggish user experience. We refactored the underlying logic, streamlined the internal data flow and as an end result, users with massive clusters should see greatly improved performance!

Other Changes

Lens 4.1 is an incremental release, and here’s the list of other changes that are visible to Lens users:

Change: list views default to a namespace (instead of listing resources from all namespaces)
Command palette
Generic logs view with Pod selector
Auto-update notifications and confirmation
Possibility to add custom Helm repository through Lens
Possibility to change visibility of common resource list columns
Suspend/resume buttons for CronJobs
Allow namespace to specified on role creation
Allow for changing installation directory on Windows
Dock tabs context menu
Display node column in Pod list
Unify age column output with kubectl
Use dark colors in Dock regardless of active theme
Improve Pod tolerations layout
Lens metrics: scrape only lens-metrics namespace
Lens metrics: Prometheus v2.19.3
Update bundled kubectl to v1.18.15
Improve how watch requests are handled
Helm rollback window with more details
Log more on startup
Export PodDetailsList component to extension API
Export Wizard components to extension API
Export NamespaceSelect component to extension API

Community Updates

Lens has continued to gain popularity within the cloud-native Kubernetes ecosystem, with over 2.5 million downloads, 12.8k GitHub stargazers, and over 130,000 active users across various contents. Given the opportunity to listen to our community, we have discovered that Lens simplifies our end users day to day lives when working with Kubernetes.

Space Invaders Extension by @chenhunghan and @jakolehm

In December we released Lens 4.0, the biggest update in our history which introduced Lens Extensions. The Extensions framework has been well received and to date, we have over thirty extensions that are either released or still in development by the community. A recently released extension we would like to highlight is the Capsule Operator Extension from Clastix Labs which provides advanced multi-tenancy and policy control on your Kubernetes cluster.

Here you can view all of our currently available extensions and expect to see many, many more extensions to be added in the coming months!

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

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 2 million downloads, over 125,000 users, and 12,000 stars on GitHub, it’s the most popular IDE for Kubernetes. https://k8slens.dev