At Demuxer we build Kuberniq, a desktop Kubernetes client for macOS and Windows, and this post is about why we wrote it when Lens and Headlamp already exist.
What we didn't like
This is our opinion, as a team that used both. Lens was our client for a long time, and we tried Headlamp when it shipped a desktop app. Both list resources, show logs and open a shell well, and many people are happy with them. Our problem was usability, for the one thing we do most.
A pod fails. In either app we'd find it, and then our hands went back to the terminal anyway: kubectl describe pod for the events, kubectl logs --previous for the run that died, kubectl edit deployment to fix it. If a field had the wrong type, we learned it when the API server refused the save. On top of that, Lens asks for a Lens ID to register the app, and we wanted to open the kubeconfig we already had and nothing else.
What Kuberniq does instead
It reads ~/.kube/config and KUBECONFIG without an account and without copying credentials, and each context opens as a window on that cluster.
The analysis goes over every namespace and lists findings such as a container restarting in a loop, a container killed for going past its memory limit, an image that cannot be pulled, or a node that is not ready. Each finding says what was seen, why it happens and what to do.
The YAML editor validates against the OpenAPI schema the cluster serves. Write replicas: "three" and it is marked as you type, next to the documentation of spec.replicas. Before anything reaches the cluster, Compare shows the diff between what's there and what you're about to apply.
The recommendations compare each container's requests with 7 days of Prometheus: CPU at the 95th percentile of the average per pod, memory at the peak per pod. Applying one goes through the same diff.
There's also logs per pod or per workload, a terminal, scale, restart, rollback to a revision, a timeline and a topology.
Getting it
The free license covers personal projects, study, teaching and open source, with the whole app and no account. There's no Linux build, which both Lens and Headlamp have.
If you use Lens or Headlamp, we'd like to know which part of their usability works for you and which part sends you back to kubectl.
