Kubernetes has become a popular technology among enterprise customers, with an increasing number of developer teams adopting it. This technology has revolutionized the way developers provision and consume infrastructure by using container technology. However, as IT administrators and operators must provide infrastructure to developers based on Kubernetes, they need to learn how to interact with the underlying infrastructure to meet their consumers’ needs.

VMware has been addressing this issue for the past two years through projects like PKS and its Tanzu portfolio, successfully bridging the gap between developers and IT operators. Its open-source project Octant is another step in that direction, providing a developer-centric web UI for developers and IT operators to gain visibility into the resources they or their teams have deployed using Kubernetes.

Octant provides a clean HTML UI based on Clarity design project that is standard across all VMware products. It is highly extensible, allowing developers to gain better visibility and understanding of the complexity of Kubernetes clusters and objects deployed using kubectl commands.

Kubernetes provides a platform for developers to deploy applications but does not provide much visibility to IT operators responsible for maintaining them. Octant addresses this issue by providing a visual representation of pods, deployments, replica sets, secrets, configmaps, and more. Some of the features that make Octant powerful include:

1. Filtering based on labels across an application when labeling is done correctly across the application deployment.

2. A resource viewer providing a high level of visibility into dependencies and relationships with different components inside an application.

3. Real-time updates as changes are made to resources using Kubectl commands (for functionality not yet covered by Octant).

4. YAML access to resources with real-time edits.

5. A terminal for the pods that can be used to execute commands on the containers within the pod.

Octant is a valuable addition to the developer toolkit and a tool IT operators can use to visualize what has been deployed into a Kubernetes cluster. In my next blog post, I will cover the deployment steps involved in getting Octant up and running for both minikube deployment and clustered Kubernetes deployment using Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG).

Note: The opinions expressed in this blog post are the author’s own and not those of their employer. Copyright © 2024 vPirate. All rights reserved.