Mirantis Acquires Lens, the World’s Most Popular Kubernetes IDE, to Simplify App Development for Amazon EKS, Google GKE, Microsoft AKS, and On-Prem Clouds

Lens has widespread adoption and is one of the top trending Kubernetes projects on GitHub

Campbell, CA, August 13, 2020 — Mirantis, the open cloud company, today announced the company has acquired Lens – the Kubernetes integrated development environment (IDE) open source project from its authors, bringing multi-cluster management into the mainstream and greatly simplifying the experience for developers working with Kubernetes and cloud-native applications. This follows the Mirantis acquisition of the team behind the product in February.

Available on Github under the MIT license, Lens has garnered widespread adoption since its launch as an open source project in March 2020. With a growing community of 35,000 users and 7,000 stargazers on GitHub, it has become one of the top trending open source projects in the cloud-native ecosystem. According to publicly available data, some of the largest companies in the world are using Lens to accelerate their Kubernetes efforts at scale, including Apple, Rakuten, Zendesk, TIM, and Adobe.

Lens eliminates the Kubernetes complexity that has hindered mainstream developer adoption since its inception. The tool unlocks situational awareness and enables users to easily manage, develop, debug, monitor, and troubleshoot their workloads across multiple clusters in real time. It supports any certified Kubernetes distribution on any infrastructure, providing freedom of choice for hundreds of enterprises around the world. Lens is a standalone desktop application and works with MacOS, Windows, and Linux operating systems. Users may download and install the software free of charge. 

“Lens has enabled our developers to be more productive by accelerating and simplifying the Kubernetes development workflow,” said Matti Paksula, CTO at Supervisor.com. “The best feature in my opinion is that when I do kubectl get pod in the terminal, the dashboard you are looking at is always in the right context. Additionally, I don’t need to worry about working with stale information because everything is real time.” 

With the acquisition, Mirantis will invest significantly in Lens future development while committing to continue working collaboratively with the Lens community and leading ecosystem players. Lens will remain free and open source.

“Just like Visual Studio was a breakthrough for software developers, Lens is a game changer for Kubernetes developers and operators. It makes writing, testing and running Kubernetes apps easy and simple on any public or private cloud.” said Adrian Ionel, co-founder and CEO, Mirantis. “Lens fills a major gap in moving people from being interested in Kubernetes to being productive with Kubernetes.”

Lens features include:

• Immediate Situational Awareness in Context: Lens provides users the easiest and fastest path to situational awareness in real-time for Kubernetes applications and clusters. With a context-aware terminal, built-in Prometheus stats, and comprehensive logging Lens provides users with the easiest and fastest navigation through all layers in the stack, so they can view performance data and troubleshoot issues. 

• Context-Aware Terminal: The built-in terminal includes a version of kubectl that is always API-compatible with your cluster and in the right context by automatically downloading and assigning the correct version in the background. As the user switches from one cluster to another, the terminal maintains the correct kubectl version and context.

• Multi-Cluster Management on Any Cloud: Access and work with any number of Kubernetes clusters on any cloud, from a single unified IDE. The clusters may be local (e.g. minikube, Docker Desktop) or external (e.g. Docker Enterprise, EKS, AKS, GKE, Rancher, or OpenShift). Clusters may be added simply by importing the kubeconfig with cluster details.

• Multiple Workspaces: Workspaces are used to organize any number of clusters into logical groups. They are useful for DevOps and SREs who need to manage multiple (even hundreds of) clusters. A single workspace contains a list of clusters and their full configuration.

• Built-In Prometheus Stats: See real-time graphs and resource utilization charts integrated into the dashboard, always in the right context. Lens comes with a built-in and multi-tenant Prometheus setup that respects role-based access control (RBAC) for each user. Users will see visualizations for all the namespaces and resources to which they have access. 

“It’s been amazing to see the rapid adoption of Lens. User growth has been entirely organic so clearly there was a need for a developer-friendly Kubernetes IDE,” said Miska Kaipiainen, founder and principal of the Lens open source project. “With Mirantis, Lens will remain vendor neutral and open source, and maintain its independence. We’re excited to invest more in new feature development, community building, and cloud native technology integrations to make the product better for everybody in the ecosystem.”

A technical demo video of Lens will be available at the KubeCon EU virtual event August 17-20 in the Demo Theater. Visit the Mirantis booth in the Platinum Expo Hall to chat live with the Lens team.

Join the Lens movement on Slack: k8slens.slack.com.