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Is it time to migrate from Lens to OpenLens to manage your Kubernetes clusters?
tl;dr; OpenLens is same as Lens IDE without proprietary components and its free of charge based on MIT license. However currently there is no signed binary available for OpenLens. This article discusses crowdfunding regarding code signature for the community, and it shows how to compile OpenLens ourselves for macOS, Linux, and Windows.
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Surely Lens IDE has gained popularity among Kubernetes administrators and application developers over time. It gathered the complex Kubernetes infrastructure in an easy-to-understand and manage interface.
Being an open source with MIT license helped Lens to gain popularity even faster. However, in recent months, the company behind Lens has started to push Lens users to create a Lens ID and it is going to have a new pricing model for enterprises. In other words, Lens stopped being open to everyone.
The Lens IDE that we usually download and install is not really open source and it is a proprietary application. It is derived from the original and open-source OpenLens where additional cloud ID and other proprietary modules such as cloud login are added to it and distributed as “Lens”. It is more like Chrome by Google which is derived from Chromium.
There are other alternatives for moving away from Lens, one of them being a CLI-based tool named k9s. However, k9s comes with limited features. and to unlock the full potential (such as visibility into custom resource definitions), there is a paid upgrade named k9s𝞪
In this article, we focus on OpenLens.
Where are executable OpenLens binaries?
Downloading and running Lens is easy. however, when looking into OpenLens release repository, you will find source codes only:
As if they simply only compile and build apps for Lens. and not OpenLens.
