There is certainly a space in the market for pretty-printed kubectl output. The complete lack of formatting and color makes it significantly harder to poke around and troubleshoot.

One thing that has been pretty effective is using 'kubectl get -o yaml | jid' which lets you poke around in the json a bit

I too have been looking for a good solution.

Some that I've found:

- octant.dev from vmware

- infra.app from kubernetes podcast a couple weeks back

- kontena lens (looks like the company shut down)

I was pretty bummed out by Kontena Lens shutting down, but I definitely sympathize with their struggles. They made a really fantastic product and gave it away for free and then they couldn't sustain development costs according to their twitter page. A couple thoughts on their departure: The application (an app image that ran on your local laptop) relied on talking to their servers, once they shut down their business, the product literally 100% stopped working. That was pretty shocking, as I didn't hear that the company was struggling before they shut down. I had to go hunt around on social media to find that news as their website was also no longer up. Although it wasn't mission critical to our work flow, as it was basically a (very very nice) GUI wrapper around Kubectl, our team came to rely on it. So it was troubling when all of a sudden part of our workflow broke. I know Kontena has a few other open source products. It would be nice if they put up the old codebase up on github even if they state explicitly that they will not maintain it, although I know how burdensome it can be to prepare code for open source if it wasn't initially designed as such.

I've been using infra.app for a couple of weeks now. It is said to be created by the founders of Kitematic. I didn't know they had left their jobs at Docker to build a new tool. Very cool! I loved using their products in the past, including Docker for mac. Hoping for good things to come.

I really like https://github.com/derailed/k9s for navigating around.

I wish something like this was available as a plugin for http://userland.org ; also, that it had a mode for "live update of results" (or, does it work with 'watch -n1' already?)

In a similar vein, there was kubenav https://github.com/kubenav/kubenav that was recently posted on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22381870

kubectl is an iffy tool, long-term annoying things like inability to ssh to a deployment and impossible-to-read events are ergonomic headaches, but jeez, electron is a lot to take on

also is this IBM now?

By "ssh to a deployment" do you mean exec into a pod? "kubectl exec -it <podname> sh"

great, but if the pod is a member of a deployment, that's a 2-step process

(1, get the name of a random pod from a deployment, 2, exec in)

Like this?

kubectl exec -it deploy/<deployment> sh

I think the complaint is about the number of screen <-> brain cycles required. "kubectl exec -it something-" <TAB> <read a list of deployment hashes, pick the first letter/number of the one you want, type it> <TAB> <read a list of pod hashes, pick the first letter/number of one, type it> <TAB> " sh".

The parent comment is saying you can use `kubectl exec -it deploy/something` instead, and it will pick a pod for you. That landed in 1.15, IIRC.

Ah, interesting. Unfortunately it works poorly with tab completion (i.e., not at all), so you still have to type the entire name of your deployment, even if there's only one in the context's namespace.

wait that's amazing -- have been waiting for this for years