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lensapp
lens
Systems & Infrastructure2020–2024
lensapp / lens

lens

Lens - The way the world runs Kubernetes

Systems & InfrastructureDevOps & Cloud
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
23Distinct people
29Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
23.2KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Lens - The way the world runs Kubernetes

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

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Also in these discussions

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This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year29 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2020-03-15 20:42:33 UTC to 2024-03-25 11:26:02 UTC.

0510152020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 16 mentions; 12 submissions, 4 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 2 submissions, 0 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 2 submissions, 2 comments20222023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 1 submissions, 3 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 1 submissions, 2 comments2024

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC16124
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC220
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC422
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC413
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC312

From the project README

An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.

Read the project’s introduction
Lens Website •  Pricing •  Forums •  Docs •  Company •  Contact •  Issue Tracker •  Login •  Download The Way The World Runs Kubernetes Meet the new standard for cloud native software development & operations. With over 1 million users, Lens is the most popular Kubernetes IDE in the world. What is Lens? Designed for Developers and DevOps Engineers, Lens provides an unparalleled experience for managing and troubleshooting Kubernetes workloads through one intuitive context-aware UI. For teams and organizations, Lens has proven to be the most effective way to learn Kubernetes, boost team productivity and reduce tools required for cloud native development. It's trusted by the world's best product teams; from innovative startups to iconic enterprises. Lens is the #1 choice for Kubernetes with over 1 million users globally. Install Download and install Lens Desktop from our website. Getting Help You can find answers to a huge variety of questions, along with a large community of helpful developers over on the Lens Forums - replies are generally very quick. If you encounter issues or have any feature requests, you can post them in the public community issues tracker. Lens Pro and Lens Enterprise customers also have access to 24/5 commercial support. To stay up to date with all the latest news and product updates, make sure you subscribe to our blog — or you can always follow us on Twitter. History of this Repository Previously, this repository contained the source code for the open source version of Lens Desktop product. The open source version of Lens Desktop has been retired and is no longer maintained. The Lens Desktop product by Mirantis is still actively developed and supported by Mirantis, but contributions are now made through extensions using the Lens extension API, rather than directly to the core product. The legacy source code for the open source version is still available in the repository's 'master'-branch. Copyright & License Copyright (c) 2024 Mirantis, Inc. - The content of this repository is released under the MIT license. Lens and the Lens Logo are trademarks of Mirantis, Inc.
Read the full README on GitHub

What Hacker News says

29 sources
kapilvt·Mar 25, 2024
Nice commit message on the removal, “first draft of new readme” https://github.com/lensapp/lens/commit/e1fc8869a9e0033fb2266... Stuff like this is why its gets really hard to trust open source projects backed by a single company not in a foundation. Seems like we’ve entered into a spectrum where such open source projects not in a foundation are equivalent to shareware, except instead of forcing payment its relicensed non OSI source visible or closed to achieve the same.
In Mirantis K8s Lens closed its source
jhoelzel·Apr 7, 2023
When kubernetes-lens came out it was the greatest software to see what is going on in a clusters. I have suggested it to basically everyone working with k8s saying its a must have tool and also made many teams install it. It was a great time for half a year and a lot of the community contributed to it, only to have them turn around and force accounts on all users: https://github.com/lensapp/lens/issues/5444 this turned into an application that now comes with a signed hidden binary, could not be build through the open source repository any more and much ohter things related to this. All in all Mirantis is not to be trusted, not to mention the fact that the tool wants to share your kube-config amongs your team which is a clear antipattern and a high security risk.
In Comparing K3s with vanilla Kubernetes
KronisLV·Mar 26, 2023
> Still, the point of this tangent about Docker Desktop is that Docker's decision to monetize via Desktop---and in a pretty irritating way that caused a great deal of heartburn to many software companies---was probably the first tangible sign that Docker Inc. is not the benevolent force that it had long seemed to be. Suddenly Docker, the open-source tool that made our work so much easier, had an ugly clash with capitalism. > Docker Hub, though, may yet be Docker's undoing. I can only assume that Docker did not realize the situation they were getting into. Docker images are relatively large, and Docker Hub became so central to the use of Docker that it became common for DevOps toolchains to pull images to production nodes straight from Docker Hub. Bandwidth is relatively expensive even before cloud provider margins; the cost of operating D
Read the rest
ocker Hub must have become huge. Docker Inc.'s scaffolding for the Docker community suddenly became core infrastructure for endless cloud environments, and effectively a subsidy to Docker's many users. I'm not sure why they couldn't have been a bit more aggressive about monetization from the start? DockerHub could have been free for an X amount of storage, with image retention of Y days by default, with Z amount of traffic allowed per month. The Internet Archive tells me that they got this half right, with "unlimited public repos" being where things went wrong: http://web.archive.org/web/20200413232159/https:/hub.docker.... > The basics of Docker for every developer, including unlimited public repos and one private repo. For all I care, Docker Desktop might have just offered a CLI solution with the tech to run it (Hyper-V or WSL2 back ends) for free, but charge extra for the GUI and additional features, like running Kubernetes workloads. BuildKit could have been touted as an enterprise offering with immense power for improving build times, at a monetary cost. Perhaps it all was in the name of increasing adoption initially? In a sense, I guess they succeeded, due to how common containers are. It is easy to wonder about these things after the fact, but generally people get rather upset when you give them things for free and later try to take them away, or introduce annoyances. Even if you cave to the feedback and roll back any such initiatives, the damage is already done, at least to some degree. I still remember a piece of software called Lens one day starting to mandate that users sign in with accounts, which wasn't previously necessary. The community reacted predictably: https://github.com/lensapp/lens/issues/5444 (they also introduced a subscription plan later: https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/wakkaj/lens_6_i...) That said, I self host my own images in a Nexus instance and will probably keep using Docker as the tooling/environment, because for my personal stuff I don't have a reason to actually switch to anything else at the moment and Docker itself is good enough. Podman Desktop and Rancher Desktop both seem viable alternatives for GUI software, whereas for the actual runtimes and cloud image registries, there are other options, though remember that you get what you pay for.
In Docker

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