kamal VS lens

Guessing you're talking about https://kamal-deploy.org/ which looks interesting, though I tend to like reconciliation logic based systems ... but often only fired off imperatively with a plan/apply separation. So I shall be having a poke around anyway :)

Navigating the deployment landscape can be a daunting task for any developer, particularly those going it alone. PopaDex uses Kamal as its deployment solution, due to its straightforward and efficient nature. This tool is designed to facilitate the quick deployment of Rails applications across diverse environments, streamlining what can often be a complicated process. Kamal's appeal lies in its ability to demystify deployment, removing the hurdles commonly associated with Docker and app deployment in general. A couple of the main benefits of Kamal:

Or you can use [https://kamal-deploy.org/] and GitHub actions for automating at least deploys, but there are still will be issues that you will need to solve.

For homelab, Docker compose should be enough

For something more production oriented https://github.com/basecamp/kamal

Kamal is a wonderfully simple way to deploy your applications anywhere. It will also be included by default in Rails 8. Kamal is trivial, but I don’t recommend using it on your development machine.

Lens

Generally I felt as if I was diving in the deepest of waters without the correct equipement and that was horrifying. Unfortunately to me, I had to dive even deeper before getting equiped with tools like ArgoCD, and k8slens. I had to start working with... HELM.

Indeed you can, with several "paid" features removed, like log tailing and pod shells. They deliberately hobbled the product. If you want to use Lens, my advice is pay for the supported version.

yes I know there is lens, but it does not allow me to see logs of multiple pods at same time and what is even more important it is not friendly for ephemeral clusters - in my case with help of kind I am recreating whole cluster each time from scratch

Let's wait for few seconds for the pods to become green, I am using Lens, it's awesome btw.

You probably don't need Rancher unless you need a GUI or manage multiple clusters, Lens or k9s might be a better fit for your use case.

`openlens` is now preferred over `Lens`, it has everything you need and none of the fluff that Lens wants to charge you for.