Mirantis, which makes it easy to unleash the power of containers and Kubernetes everywhere, announced the latest tech preview update to Lens, which gives users easy access to a managed Kubernetes development cluster.

Managed dev clusters are made available directly from the Lens Desktop application through the Lens Spaces cloud-based service. Users can now access a development cluster optimized for software development needs.

"With over 500,000 Lens users, the developer clusters feature is now fully implemented with Lens 5.4," said Miska Kaipiainen, vice president of engineering, Mirantis. "It's possible some corner cases may need ironing and some scaling issues may present themselves, hence the label ‘tech preview.' Expect to see many improvements to this functionality over the coming months."

The latest Lens update makes Kubernetes more accessible to everyone, giving cloud native developers and others access to a managed development cluster that is tuned for software development needs. The update also turns Lens into much more than just an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) but a Kubernetes platform for developers as well.

"I use Lens every day at work and on several side projects. It provides a single pane to manage applications running on different Kubernetes clusters and definitely simplifies day-to-day operations," said Luc Juggery, Docker and Kubernetes trainer and IT consultant. "I was excited to see the Lens Spaces feature, as it's an easy and efficient way to share a development cluster among team members."

New to Lens

• Offload Local Cluster - Instead of working on a resource-constrained local machine, transition Kubernetes development work to the cloud and access from Lens Spaces.
• Save Resources - Ensure your operating system resources are highly available and accessible for more important projects.
• Intelligent Auto-Shutdown - Managed development clusters will detect inactivity and auto-shutdown to avoid extra costs, reducing large public cloud provider bills.
• Standardized Setup - Teams can be onboarded quickly; plus applications are created in a standardized Kubernetes development environment ensuring transferability to a production environment.

Pricing and Availability

Lens, the open source project, is 100% open source. With more than 5 million downloads, more than 500,000 users, and 17,000 stars on GitHub, it's the most popular IDE for Kubernetes. Download the Lens software at https://k8slens.dev.

The Lens update is open source software and available now.