Kubernetes is a very important Orchestrator, which has now become mandatory for any engineer to include it in their application to make a strong architecture, thus pushing him to learn about the containerized applications, Cloudnative Tools and a better understanding of Kubernetes and its components as well.
Lens is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for Kubernetes (K8S) which plays an instrumental part in running Kubernetes in the world, a true magic that we can say.
It helps in managing your Kubernetes clusters in a much beginner-friendly format which makes it easier even for the one who doesn't know much about Kubernetes and just starting up in the journey.
LensIDE is the FOSS (Free & OpenSource Software) by Mirantis which is the largest and most Advanced Kubernetes platform in the world with more than 700k users every month.
It can run on your local system or on the cloud and help you manage your Kubernetes clusters in deeper detail about your pods, deployments, images, containers and a lot more.
Here it was about Lens IDE which is an amazing tool and a true gem for CloudNative, which you can find in my previous blog if you want to know more about its features, use cases, and how to download it:
Lens AppIQ
Lens AppIQ is a Software as a Service, a web-based product hosted by Lens which is available and opened to the public for free. Lens AppIQ takes a unique application-centric approach that simplifies the deployment and management of Kubernetes applications with its secure Kubernetes application management platform that has simplified every developer's life.
Why to use it? What's the problem it solves?
Normally when the company is in the starting phase, they don't have a much larger team and the existing team members usually have a nice knowledge of platform engineering so they are platform engineers but soon as the investment grows and the team scales up more people join the team and they don't necessarily have a good knowledge of Kubernetes and its components, thus platform engineers don't have many options other than teaching them what is Kubernetes and pushing them as well to explore it and learn about it before proceeding any further, which will for sure take a lot of time and does not bring any value to the company until they haven't learned it all and understood their application's architecture as well.
Now here to save a lot of time, Lens AppIQ enables developers to contribute to the application without getting to know about Kubernetes, by letting them have access to the information about their application and cluster like how much resource or CPU is being consumed by the application at different times in the form of spikes and if they see any major spikes then they may find an error at that time in the application, and they can further troubleshoot and look out for some solutions.
Impact on Roles of Platform Engineers & Application Developers
For Platform Engineers:
So the main challenge for a Platform developer when the team scales up is to enable a developer and this normally results in building up an internal developer platform which takes up a lot of time in building with scripting, and tools that a developer can simply reuse or get access to some information about their clusters and applications.
Lens AppIQ helps them to enable developers so a platform engineer can leverage these tools to enable the developers and then further, can offer compliance and set up policies ensuring all applications are running healthy and stand onto correct grounds in case of consumption WID listed container Registries.
For Developers:
Developers can have access to information about their applications and clusters like the amount of memory and CPU consumption, their environment variables like python and node.js, and jump to see the logs, pods, deployments, Replica Sets, and how any of them are running or might be running earlier without happen to have any knowledge about them.
Lens AppIQ has a very App Centric Dashboard, unlike any other infrastructure or Kubernetes-centric as a result of which everything that happens actually goes around the Application.
In-Built Benefits of using Lens AppIQ
WebHooks & Security
Now since the Lens AppIQ is abstracting clusters so Software or application engineer doesn't even have to worry about the cluster after the application is been deployed by the Platform Engineer in a production cluster.
They can even set policies to ensure that their application is behaving in the right rails, even if something does not as planned, the platform engineers would be informed via the Webhooks they configured to be informed if something goes wrong.
Agent Setup for Event-Tracking
Earlier, we needed to set up SSH in the clusters, but in this developers don't need to access the cluster instead an agent will be set up by the Platform Engineers which will look out for some errors or if the application going down due to some issue and then the developers can get notification about it and then can proceed further to work onto it.
Handling Errors
As soon as we deploy our application, we can have a look at all our resources like pods, deployments, workspaces and the events taking place with our application and can get a real-time status of our application. After placing the agent after implementing WebHooks in our application by the Platform Engineers, we can track events and get notified if something goes wrong through multiple mechanisms of our choice whether it could be through Slack, PagerDuty or we can even set up our custom WebHook of our own choice.
Configuring a WebHook can a really tedious work to do, if we decide to do it manually as we need to have a nice understanding of APIs, WebHooks, how to manage our Kubernetes APIs and how we see all of our resources changing like Pods, deployments, Config Maps, and How do they config themselves so that WebHooks might get triggered, which is finally time-consuming for Platform Engineers to manage and thus using Lens AppIQ Brings up a lot of time saved from getting used up in all of these things, and can be done with just 3 CLICKS!!
Getting relevant Outcomes
As soon as we start Tracking our events, we get to see the relevant outcomes as well like when was the application deployed when was it restarted or at what points it was restarted in the past to figure out the time at which it might have been getting some issues which we can further troubleshoot and fix.
How to get Started with Lens AppIQ
Before downloading Lens AppIQ it is recommended to download or set up the Agent by the Cluster Admin who has the administrative power over your applications' clusters.
Install Lens Desktop: Download Lens Desktop and connect to your registered account, if you do not have an account then u can register and download it:
Further, connect to your Lens ID and activate the Lens, connect it to your testing cluster and enjoy having a seat in the IDE and explore with its awesome functionalities.
Setting up LensIQ Account: Let's direct to the web and register a Lens AppIQ account and organization through the web, but also it would have asked you to make a Lens ID thatswhy, I asked you to download LensIDE in the first place to spare some time. After logging in through your Lens ID it would ask for the name of your organization.
Installing Agent: If you look at the top of Lens Desktop’s Applications pane with a cluster connected, you’ll see a link to install Lens AppIQ agent/control plane components in your cluster. These (very resource-sparing) components interrogate and monitor cluster activity and metrics, and provide this information to Lens AppIQ, from where you can view them in Lens Desktop, or via a web browser.
To install the agent, click the link, which will open a new dialog box, then push the button to install the Lens AppIQ agent in your cluster – there’s no need to do anything else.
You will see a list of attached clusters and can click on any cluster to view the Lens AppIQ version of application-centric views.
Lens AppIQ shows similar application-centric views on the web, further enriched by information collected by Lens AppIQ components running on the cluster.
Attaching a Cluster using Lens AppIQ WebUI:
If you’re not using Lens Desktop to access Lens AppIQ, Lens AppIQ provides a complete, stand-alone web experience. Just visit Lens AppIQ and pick one of the sign-in options – if you have a Lens ID, use that to sign in. Otherwise, clicking the Google or GitHub SSO button will create a Lens ID and a Lens AppIQ account for you, automatically (using the Free Forever tier).
To connect a cluster, click (aptly enough) “+ Connect Cluster.” As with Lens Desktop Applications, you’ll be asked to give the address:port of your cluster’s API, and provide an optional short name. Click “Generate Command” and you’ll see a cut-and-paste-able kubectl apply command that will install the Lens AppIQ components, and tell Lens AppIQ your Lens ID account’s UUID, so it can associate cluster information correctly with your account.
Connecting a Cluster from the Lens AppIQ webUI requires providing the address/port of the Kubernetes API, an optional name, and then running a provided kubectl apply command on your cluster, using the kubectl CLI.
Thus in this way, both of these roles can work together in a much interactive and effective way to plan out in this modern-day architecture. Platform Engineers thus simplify the process by simply maintaining infrastructure during compliance.
Otherwise, it would become kind of a blind situation for the developer as well as they won't be able to see what is going on in the cluster after they have deployed their application for the production to the platform engineering team.
I will surely get some more insights and amazing use cases of this amazing tool Lens and some other tools as well to give a boost to the knowledge of CloudNative and ease out our lives with this amazing Software.
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