Mirantis Adds Ability to Centrally Manage Lens Dev Environments
Mirantis this week added the ability to centrally manage deployments of the enterprise edition of its Lens tools for building container applications for Kubernetes clusters.
Miska Kaipiainen, vice president of product engineering for Mirantis, said the Lens Control Center would make it simpler for IT teams to centrally manage instances of Lens Pro, an edition of the open source tool that Mirantis bundles with an instance of Kubernetes that runs on a local machine.
In addition to centrally managing configurations of Lens, the Lens Control Center enables single sign-on capabilities with support for Okta, Microsoft Active Directory or Azure. It also provides the ability to limit the network connections that can be made by any instance of Lens Pro.
Finally, Lens Control Center makes it possible to also centralize billing of usage for Lens Pro.
Lens Control Center is designed primarily for IT teams that are looking to centralize the management of DevOps workflows under a platform engineering team that has assumed responsibility for setting up and managing development environments, said Kaipiainen.
Earlier this year, Mirantis acquired Shipa to add automated application discovery, security and observability to its Lens Kubernetes Platform. The Shipa platform automatically creates all required Kubernetes objects and configuration files for an application and deploys them to all required clusters. It also provides canary and rollback management capabilities. All application objects are created, deployed and monitored automatically versus requiring developers to create Kubernetes clusters using YAML files.
Mirantis claims there are now more than one million developers using some version of Lens to build container applications, with thousands of organizations also adopting Lens Pro. Lens, acquired by Mirantis in 2020, provides developers with a graphical tool for building container applications that can run on Linux, macOS and Windows operating systems. It is designed to enable developers to develop, manage, debug, monitor and troubleshoot their workloads across multiple clusters in real-time.
There is, of course, no shortage of options when it comes to tools for building container applications. Mirantis has been making a case for an approach that is tied more tightly to the Kubernetes clusters that most container applications are going to be deployed on. By including an instance of Kubernetes also gives developers deeper visibility into how their applications will behave in a production environment, noted Kaipiainen.
It’s too early to say whether IT teams will be centralizing the management of developer environments as part of an effort to boost productivity. In theory, every minute a developer spends configuring their environment is one less minute they are writing code. Many developers, however, prefer to configure their development environment to suit their individual preferences, so organizations will need to navigate the fine line between centralized management and personal developer preference.
In the meantime, however, as the number of container applications that need to be built and deployed continues to expand, the pace at which these applications are constructed clearly needs to accelerate.
