Most Popular Lens Extensions: June 2021
In December 2020, we launched Lens 4.0 — a release that allows extensions to plug in directly to the Lens UI, add visualizations, functionality and integrate with technologies and services around Kubernetes.
Since our launch, we’ve seen amazing traction around Lens. As the Lens community continues to grow, so does the number of community-built extensions. The community includes well known brands from the cloud native ecosystem, as well as individual contributors. By today, 100+ extensions have been created. Our users are leveraging these extensions to improve productivity and efficiency when working with cloud native technologies.
In this article, we want to showcase the most popular publicly available extensions built by our wonderful community.
What are Lens Extensions?
The features that Lens includes out-of-the-box are just the start. Lens extensions allow users to add new features to support their workflows. A rich extensibility model lets extension authors plug directly into the Lens UI and contribute functionality through the same APIs used by Lens itself.
Organizations may leverage the extensions API to develop their own proprietary features that enrich the Lens UI with information and functionality for their specific use cases. While private extensions remain exclusive to the organization that built them, public extensions may be easily consumed via Lens IDE.
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.
Below you will find several Lens extensions built by our community that are readily available for consumption. You can also find a list of our publicly available extensions here.
Mirantis Container Cloud Extension
The Mirantis Container Cloud (MCC) extension brought to Lens by Mirantis allows MCC users to connect an MCC instance to Lens without needing a Kubeconfig file. You can view more details regarding this extension here.
Starboard Extension
The Starboard extension by Aqua Security provides visibility into vulnerability assessment reports for Kubernetes workloads stored as custom security resources. As a result, Lens users who install the extension can view details of security risks exactly where they belong, alongside the Kubernetes built-in resources to which they apply. You can view more details regarding this extension here.
Carbonetes Container Security Extension
The Carbonetes Container Security extension by Carbonetes provides full visibility into the contents of the pods running in your Kubernetes cluster. You can see the bill of materials for each pod, as well as its security and policy history. You can kick off a multi-threat analysis of your pods and then evaluate those results against the current security policy. This will help our users identify and resolve security threats like stale images, configuration drift, exposure to new vulnerabilities, outdated policies, and more. You can view additional details regarding this extension here.
Kubernetes Resource Map Extension
The Kubernetes Resource Map extension by nevalla displays Kubernetes resources and their relations as a real-time force-directed graph. This will help Lens users to better understand how their k8s resources and objects are related. Users can filter by namespace and view specific resource details. You can view additional details regarding this extension here.
Kubecost Extension
The Kubecost extension by Kubecost lets Lens users visualize their Kubernetes costs directly in the Lens UI. Allowing users to view spend and costs efficiently by namespace, pod, deployment, and more! You can find additional details regarding this extension here.
GKE Sync Extension
The GKE Sync extension by jakolehm automatically syncs projects and GKE clusters from Google Cloud Platform to Lens using gcloud. Through the GKE Extension, Lens users can now add GKE clusters without writing any Kubectl or generating a kubeconfig file. You can find additional details regarding this extension here.
Capsule Extension
The Capsule extension by Clastix provides advanced multi-tenancy and policy control on your Kubernetes cluster. With the Capsule extension, a cluster administrator can easily manage from a single pane of glass all resources of a Kubernetes cluster, including all the Tenants created through the Capsule Operator. You can find additional details regarding this extension here.
Awesome Lens Community
On behalf of the entire Lens team, I would like to thank our wonderful community and partners for all their support and feedback. The support provided by our community has been priceless, and we feel incredibly fortunate!
Our users have written countless organic blogs, articles, and social posts on how Lens helps them manage multiple Kubernetes clusters. These organic efforts from our community have helped shape Lens into an impactful cloud-native open source tool.
We have also been lucky to partner with some incredible organizations. Our partners have taken time out of their busy schedules to build extensions on top of Lens that allow our users to leverage multiple cloud native technologies.
The team and I want to be as responsive and transparent as possible with our community moving forward. Therefore, we will continue to iterate, introduce features and work with more partners to build additional extensions on top of Lens.
The team and I would love to hear your feedback, good or bad. If you enjoy Lens, we would greatly appreciate leaving us a Stargazer via 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 5 million downloads, over 200,000 users, and 14.2k stars on GitHub, it’s the most popular IDE for Kubernetes. https://k8slens.dev
