k8s info: VMware Tanzu Octant - A web-based, highly extensible platform for developers to better understand the complexity of Kubernetes clusters

Octant is a tool for developers to understand how applications run on a Kubernetes cluster. It aims to be part of the developer's toolkit for gaining insight and approaching complexity found in Kubernetes. Octant offers a combination of introspective tooling, cluster navigation, and object management along with a plugin system to further extend its capabilities

So how would I install this?

1. First on my k8s cluster lets create a deployment and a service. You can skip this step if you already have workloads on your cluster. These commands will work on any cluster as the image exists on DockerHub itself so as long as you can get to DockerHub these kubectl commands will work.

$ kubectl run pbs-demo --image=pasapples/pbs-demo-image --replicas=2 --port=8080
$ kubectl expose deploy pbs-demo --type=LoadBalancer --port=80 --target-port=8080
$ http http://101.195.48.144/customers/1

HTTP/1.1 200
Content-Type: application/hal+json;charset=UTF-8
Date: Tue, 03 Dec 2019 16:11:54 GMT
Transfer-Encoding: chunked

{
    "_links": {
        "customer": {
            "href": "http://101.195.48.144/customers/1"
        },
        "self": {
            "href": "http://101.195.48.144/customers/1"
        }
    },
    "name": "pas",
    "status": "active"
}

2. To install Octant you can view instructions on the GitHub page as follows

https://github.com/vmware-tanzu/octant

Given I am on a Mac it's installed using brew as shown below. For other OS refer to link above

$ brew install octant

3. Thats it you can now launch the UI as shown below.

$  octant

2019-12-03T21:47:56.271+0530 INFO module/manager.go:79 registering action {"component": "module-manager", "actionPath": "deployment/configuration", "module-name": "overview"}
2019-12-03T21:47:56.271+0530 INFO module/manager.go:79 registering action {"component": "module-manager", "actionPath": "overview/containerEditor", "module-name": "overview"}
2019-12-03T21:47:56.271+0530 INFO module/manager.go:79 registering action {"component": "module-manager", "actionPath": "overview/serviceEditor", "module-name": "overview"}
2019-12-03T21:47:56.271+0530 INFO module/manager.go:79 registering action {"component": "module-manager", "actionPath": "octant/deleteObject", "module-name": "configuration"}
2019-12-03T21:47:56.272+0530 INFO dash/dash.go:370 Using embedded Octant frontend
2019-12-03T21:47:56.277+0530 INFO dash/dash.go:349 Dashboard is available at http://127.0.0.1:7777

Octant should immediately launch your default web browser on 127.0.0.1:7777

And to view our deployed application!!!!

It's a nice UI and it even has the ability to switch to a different k8s context from the menu bar itself

More Information

1. Seeing is Believing: Octant Reveals the Objects Running in Kubernetes Clusters
https://blogs.vmware.com/cloudnative/2019/08/12/octant-reveals-objects-running-in-kubernetes-clusters/

2. GitHub project page
https://github.com/vmware-tanzu/octant