k9s VS aptakube

Pierre: The first tool I recommend is K9s. It's not just a time-saver but a productivity booster. With its intuitive interface, you can speed up all the usual kubectl commands, access logs, edit resources and configurations, and more. It's like having a personal assistant for your cluster management tasks.

The last thing you really need is a common set of tools that you want fingertip access to. I really commonly use LazyGit and K9s in my day job so those are the tools I will show off in this article.

K9s is your best friend (get it? 🐶) when exploring your cluster via the terminal. It shares commonality with Vim for its interaction style using shortcuts and starting commands with: but don’t let that discourage you. K9s keeps a vigilant eye on Kubernetes activities, providing real-time information and intuitive commands for resource interaction.

k9s: brew install k9s

I would like to put in a vote for k9s, which is also on the list at Terminal Trove. [0] It's the most convenient tool I've ever found for Kubernetes management. Based on that experience I'll definitely be checking out Harlequin.

[0] https://k9scli.io/

$ wget https://github.com/derailed/k9s/releases/download/v0.29.1/k9s_Darwin_amd64.tar.gz $ tar -xzf k9s_Darwin_amd64.tar.gz $ sudo mv k9s /usr/local/bin/

All in all, run things, do some kubectl apply -f something.yml every day, install k9s, and try to configure a big one cluster at some point.

(K9s is one of my favorite tools for navigating Kubernetes clusters through the CLI).

K9s is an open-source, terminal-based UI for interacting with your Kubernetes clusters, making navigating, observing, and managing your apps easier. If you use Kubectl but wish it was easier and faster to use, K9s might be just what you're looking for!

k9s

Are you specifically looking for a free Kubernetes GUI?

If you’re open to commercial options, have a look at what Aptakube (https://aptakube.com) can do.

One feature that sets it apart from other UIs is connecting to multiple clusters simultaneously and seeing all resources in a single table.

Disclaimer: I’m the author

During my previous job, when we were migrating to Kubernetes I couldn’t really find a GUI app that I liked, and most importantly, that could connect to multiple clusters simultaneously. We had 6 clusters and having to switch context constantly was annoying

I ended up building one [1] to use myself, shared with a few people and they loved it. I asked if they’d pay for it and to my surprise, a lot of people said yes. I’ve put up a website and a “pre-order” button with a regressive monthly discount. Sales were going up month after month, and a few months later I decided to quit my job to go all in on it.

Today, I’m averaging on ~€5k/mo from this app, but I’m still doing some part time freelancing, as well as building other products that are not as successful, but are making >€1000/mo

The latest one is open source, privacy friendly analytics for apps [2] that I’m still very actively working on. This is my current “side project” as the previous side project became my main job :)

There’s also an open source upvote site [3] that I haven’t had much time to work on lately, but still generating $$ monthly.

[1] https://aptakube.com

In case you're into Kubernetes, check out Aptakube, a Kubernetes Desktop Client built with Tauri 😊

Aptakube is GUI application for Kubernetes that uses the same Kubeconfig files we mentioned above and can connect to multiple clusters at the same time. It essentially presents all your Kubernetes resources as if it was a single clusters. We invite you to try it out free today 😊

I have two projects, combined doing ~€1500/mo

https://fider.io - an open source alternative to UserVoice. I started this one 6 years ago to learn Go and React. I’ve seen thousands of instances out there being self hosted, so I started a cloud hosting to those who don’t want to manage it themselves.

https://aptakube.com - Desktop Client for Kubernetes. This is very recent, launch was 2 weeks ago, so it’s only starting to get some traction now.

I’m leaving my job to go full time indie hacker now, wish me luck!

I'm giving a shot on https://aptakube.com. not OSS, but so far has been a great alternative to lens and k9s. The guy behind it made a thread here a while ago.

Thanks again for sharing your feedback! In case you have more, you can drop them here or add them to https://github.com/aptakube/aptakube