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Lens 5.2 is Generally Available

K8slens follows up on the popular feedback to deliver enhancements alongside new functionalities.

Sept. 17, 2021, 1:22 p.m.

TL;DR

K8slens, on September 8, 2021, announced the release of Lens 5.2, moving various improvements up from the most recent in the 2nd quarter, Lens 5.0.

The improvements on this release reflect k8slens' feedback survey policy.

Key Facts

1
This is the 3rd release of the year 2021.
2
K8slens hinted that feedback from users has been pivotal in their priority setting.
3
The new release is optimized with Apple’s Silicon chip support (M1).
4
The enhanced cluster removal functionality also features as one of the main improvements in the new release.

Details

It is the last month of the 3rd quarter of the year 2021. Anticipation is high for pending releases of quarterly release cadence projects, especially those yet to be announced. The open source Kubernetes project, Lens, was last updated in June 2021 and fell among the list as mentioned earlier until the early days of September when they announced Lens 5.2. The release hosts many new features, improvements, enhancements, and as usual, bug fixes. Of all these modifications, Apple Silicon chip support (M1), improved cluster removal Operandi, and the Monaco editor integration are the main highlights of this release.

We upgraded Electron, the engine behind the entire Lens desktop program, saw an upgrade to version 12. It is enhanced native support for creating binaries for Apple M1 machines to adequately support the new machines powered by Apple M1 Silicon. Apple M1 Silicon synergy will significantly improve user experience and reduce the bugs encountered.

The Auto-join Cluster Tokens functionality was created to give Kubernetes administrators the option to programmatically deploy their clusters on Lens Spaces without using the Lens desktop interface. This capability is appropriate for users who want to link their clusters to Lens Spaces manually or who only have access to their clusters via a bastion host or leap boxes.

Users can generate and retrieve an auto-join cluster token from the Lens Space, then use this token to install the required components into their clusters.

Many positive and negative reactions greeted its most significant release since joining the open source community - Lens 5.0 (released in June 2021). The improvements on this release reflect k8slens' feedback survey policy. Adding and removing clusters on the project got most of the negative reviews in the extensive user surveys conducted by K8slens. It was determined that it was not blended to a suitable user experience. The good news is, this concern has been fixed - users can now trigger a quick launch to add clusters directly from the catalogue. The UI also displays related hints to guide the user when removing clusters.

The Monaco Code Editor is licensed under the MIT license; the code editor is an open source tool responsible for powering the VS Code and is now one of the most impactful enhancements on the Lens Project. This integration will improve the potential for future opportunities for Lens and improve YAML editing functionalities.

The bug fixes that were popularly flagged in the surveys have been fixed. The hotbars have been limited to 12 slots. The Catalog sidebar has fixed font size differences. It features updates to the dashboard to reflect cluster changes in nodes and custom resource definition (CRD) views, updated kubectl, and fixed metrics loading.