Lens 5.2 Released

Published in

k8slens

5 min readSep 8, 2021

We are proud to release Lens 5.2 today, this release consists of several new and improved features, including many interesting enhancements and bug fixes! This release’s main highlights consist of Apple’s Silicon chip support (M1), improved user experience for adding / removing clusters, Monaco editor integration and more.

Gathering feedback from our community remains one of our top priorities. This feedback has resulted in many of the updates, feature enhancements, and improved user experiences that you see in our latest release.

Learn more about the new features and enhancements below. If you are new to Lens, get started today!

Optimized for Apple M1 Silicon

In order to properly support the new machines powered by Apple M1 Silicon, we upgraded Electron (powering the entire Lens desktop application) to version 12 with native support for building binaries targeting M1 machines. This is critical to ensure all our users have an amazing experience. With Lens being optimized for the Apple M1 Silicon, we are confident that M1 users will see improved performance and fewer bugs.

Add / Remove Clusters Effortlessly

With every major release, we are always focusing on improving existing features and functionality. We listen to and highly appreciate all user feedback, whether it is good or bad.

The release of Lens 5 back in June 2021, was by far the largest release since we open sourced the project back in March 2020 and it came with many UI/UX updates. After conducting several user feedback surveys, we learned that adding and removing a cluster was not optimized for the best experience. I am proud to say that we have listened to your feedback / suggestions and made significant improvements. Users can now add and remove clusters effortlessly. Here’s what we improved:

Quick launch to add clusters directly from the Catalog.
UI guidance and hints regarding usage of kubesync for import / managing clusters from kubeconfigs for more clarity of the feature.
Stabilize the ability to remove clusters by adding a new dialog that will guide the user when removing entries from their kubeconfig to increase clarity and ensure expected results.

Monaco Editor Integration

As always, making impactful enhancements to Lens is one of our top priorities. With great collaboration from the community, we have taken the opportunity and necessary steps to integrate Moncao editor into Lens. Monaco editor is the editor that powers VScode and has several features that will open a number of enhancement opportunities for our terminal and yaml editing capabilities in the future.

Auto-Join Cluster Tokens

The Auto-Join Cluster Tokens feature was built to allow Kubernetes administrators the ability to onboard their clusters to Lens Spaces programmatically without using the Lens desktop application. This feature is ideal for people who want to manually connect their clusters to Lens Spaces or for those who can access their clusters only through a bastion host or jump boxes.

Simply create and grab auto-join cluster token from your Lens Space and install the necessary components with this token into your cluster. After a few seconds, you should be able to see your cluster appearing in your Lens Space!

Other Notable Changes

Lens 5.2 is an incremental release, and here’s the list of other changes:

Notable features:

Made copying Kubernetes resource names from the UI easier
Added ability to rename Hotbars
Namespace selector UX improvements
Metrics query improvements plus metrics added to namespaces and jobs

Notable bug fixes:

Improved dashboard updates reflecting cluster changes in nodes and custom resource definition (CRD) views
Fixed metrics loading for some Kubernetes resources
Fixed font size variations in the Catalog sidebar
Updated bundled kubectl to v1.21.2 to improve port-forward connections
Limit Hotbars to 12 slots

In Case You Missed Our Previous Release…

Lens 5 improves collaboration and teamwork for anyone working with Kubernetes. We are lowering the barrier of entry for new users and improving productivity for experienced users.

The highlights of Lens 5 are Catalog, Hotbars and a cherry on top: Spaces. If you’re interested in learning more about the features brought to Lens 5, you can read our previous release announcement blog post here.

Community Updates

To The Lens Family

On behalf of the entire Lens team, I would like to thank our wonderful community for all of their support and feedback. The support provided by our community has been priceless, and we feel incredibly fortunate!

Lens is being used by over 250,000 happy Kubernetes users and it continues to grow at a rate we were not even able to imagine. And this is just the beginning! Our top priority remains the same, creating the best experience for anyone working with Kubernetes.

We plan to continue to release updates, feature enhancements and improvements to Lens. If you enjoy Lens, we would greatly appreciate you giving us a star on GitHub. This allows our developers and contributors to see the love and appreciation for the project!

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 250,000 users and 15.6k stars on GitHub, it’s the most popular IDE for Kubernetes. https://k8slens.dev