Useful Tools for Better Kubernetes Development
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A collection of awesome Kubernetes tools and projects to deploy, secure, and monitor your Kubernetes clusters.
Previously I shared top Technologies & Tools to Watch in 2021, which received a ton of support from the DevOps and SRE community. So today I’m listing my top Kubernetes tools for testing and development.
Lens
For a while, I was an exclusive GKE user, spoiled by its simplicity and the managed dashboard on the GCP console. For local development, running the Kubernetes Dashboard maintained by the Kubernetes community fit most of my needs. However, as I transitioned into managing multi- and hybrid-cloud environments, I needed a single tool to interact with GKE, EKS, and local minikube clusters.
Lens is an open-source Kubernetes IDE that makes it easy to switch between multiple clusters and interact with deployed applications. Aqua Security also has an extension for Starboard that integrates vulnerability testing, which makes the DevSecOps workflow easier to manage.
Fairwinds Tools
Fairwinds and Aqua Securrity provides several useful Kubernetes tools to validate, scan, and optimize applications:
- Polaris: deployed as a dashboard, admission controller, or a CLI tool to audit and validate deployment best practices (e.g. does your deployment have health checks defined, are resource requests and limits configured)
- Kube-hunter: looks for security weaknesses in running clusters
- Kube-bench: runs the CIS Kubernetes Benchmark and flags failed configurations
- Trivy: vulnerability scanning tool for containers that you can integrate into the CI pipeline
- Goldilocks: queries resource utilization in each namespace by using the Kubernetes vertical-pod autoscaler in recommendation mode. For more information, check out “Ultimate Kubernetes Resource Planning Guide”
