DEV Community: Ole Lensmar

Monokle VS-Code Extension

Ole Lensmar — Wed, 30 Aug 2023 16:01:12 +0000

Super excited to share the newest addition to our open-source tooling arsenal: Monokle's Visual Studio Code extension. If you're knee-deep in Kubernetes resource validations or just venturing out, this is designed to supercharge and simplify your journey without ever leaving your VS Code environment.

Why you might want to check this out:

Instant, Pre-commit Validation: No more tedious checks! Get real-time alerts and navigate directly to errors, even if you're not a Kubernetes guru.
Customisation Galore: Kickstart with our default policies or get your hands dirty and customise validations according to your unique needs. We're talking everything from Pod Security Standards, NSA/CISA Hardening Guidance, Community Best Practices, Kubernetes Schemas and deprecations, resource links, etc, to classic YAML syntax checks
Integrate with Monokle Cloud: If you're working in a team setting, Monokle Cloud lets you craft policies that every member can access via this extension, ensuring your pull requests align with team-established best practices and policies pre-commit.

For those curious about how Monokle Cloud and our VS Code Extension play together, we've made the integration process buttery smooth. Set up centralized policies on the cloud, and they're ready to roll in every team member's VS Code setup.

Whether you're a seasoned Kubernetes professional or a curious newcomer, we hope this extension makes your life a bit easier. Give it a whirl and let us know your thoughts.

Cheers!

Monokle 2.1 - We love YAML so you don't have to

Ole Lensmar — Fri, 12 May 2023 07:05:12 +0000

We're thrilled to unveil Monokle Desktop v2.1, the latest major release of our open-source IDE that loves Kubernetes YAMLs more than any other. This release is focused on performance, stability and UX - showing even more love for

k8s aware YAML editing with real-time validation, context-sensitive help, etc
Interactive Kustomize and Helm-Chart dry-runs for debugging and validation
Graph and dependency visualisation for your resources
Cluster inspection, troubleshooting and validation
And so much more that you would have stopped reading before getting this far anyway..

Head over to https://monokle.io or https://github.com/kubeshop/monokle to download and give it a try - read a more elaborate announcement at - https://monokle.io/blog/monokle-2-1-release - and give us your mostly unfiltered feedback on Discord - our plushies salute you!

Yet another Yaml Validator sees the light - Yay!

Ole Lensmar — Mon, 12 Dec 2022 11:13:09 +0000

Happy to announce the first public release of Monokle CLI - an extensible open-source validation framework for Kubernetes manifests/YAMLs.

Out of the box it allows you to validate for

YAML syntax
Kubernetes schema compliance
Resource links/references
OPA Policies (security, etc)
Custom validation rules

Monokle CLI uses an es-lint inspired configuration approach and is easily extended with custom validators that can be shared with others in our community plugins repository. It also comes with a GitHub action and real-time development/debugging support in Monokle Cloud.

Check out the announcement blogpost that walks you through all this and how to get started - or head over to the GitHub repo and start from there.

Feedback is of course appreciated - let's shift left and get those YAMLs right before they mess up our clusters!

Introducing Monokle Cloud

Ole Lensmar — Tue, 01 Nov 2022 10:03:32 +0000

Folks - happy to share our next step in the Monokle eco-system - Monokle Cloud - a free browser-based tool for exploring and validating Kubernetes manifests, Helm Charts and Kustomize Overlays in any public GitHub repo.

Short on time? Watch this 4-minute demo of Monokle Cloud in all its glory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ds4OLjlI620

Read the announcement for a more protein-rich overview...

Try it out!

Try out one of the direct links below to see Monokle Cloud in action:

The default branch of the opencost repository
The output of Kustomize for the helloWorld kustomization in the official kustomize repository
The resources generated by the Prometheus Helm Chart
A comparison of two release branches in the argo-cd repository

(you will be asked to authenticate with GitHub with minimal permissions)

Wait! There's Monokle-more...

At the same time we are also releasing

a GitHub action that you can use to validate your manifests in your CI/CD pipelines on GitHub
a Monokle CLI for performing all supported validations locally or as part of any CI/CD workflow
a Chrome Extension that integrates actions for Monokle Cloud into the GitHub UI

These 3 are all open-source (MIT) and available on GitHub.

Happy yamling!

Monokle 1.10 improves on cluster inspection

Ole Lensmar — Fri, 19 Aug 2022 08:32:16 +0000

We're happy to announce Monokle 1.10 - now adding a bunch of interactive features to help you inspect your k8s clusters:

Open a shell directly to a pod from the UI
Follow pod logs in the UI
Scale / Restart actions
See object age/status directly in the k8s navigator

We've also added a terminal to help you run your fav cli tools from inside the UI - and improved the integrated OPA validations, global search-and-replace, Docker Image inspector, Cluster-compare, etc. etc.

Lot's of goodies to make your everyday GitOps / Kubernetes configuration workflows so much easier!

As before - Monokle is 100% OSS/MIT licensed and free to download from GitHub - no registration required.

If you have any feedback - good or bad - we'd love to hear it!

Download the latest release from GitHub: https://github.com/kubeshop/monokle

Release announcement is at https://kubeshop.io/blog/monokle-v1-10-release-notes

Oh - and it's Monokles' 1 year anniversary - Happy Birthday!

Kusk Gateway beta1 - OpenAPI-first for Kubernetes

Ole Lensmar — Thu, 31 Mar 2022 06:40:30 +0000

Folks - we're happy announce beta-1 of our open-source Ingress controller Kusk Gateway - which makes your OpenAPI/Swagger definition the source-of-truth for both functional and operational traits of your API.

If you're using OpenAPI to build REST APIs for Kubernetes Kusk is for you; operational configuration is provided by use of a dedicated x-kusk extension in your OpenAPI/Swagger definition, for example:

x-kusk:
  cors:
    origins:
      - '*'
    methods:
      - POST
      - PATCH
      - DELETE
      - PUT
      - GET
      - OPTIONS
    headers:
      - Content-Type
    credentials: true
    max_age: 86200
  qos:
    retries: 10
    request_timeout: 60 
    idle_timeout: 30

will ensure timeouts and CORS settings for your API when you deploy it.

Or if you're keen on mocking all (or parts) of your API you can add the following:

x-kusk:
  mocking:
    enabled: true

which will result in Kusk Gateway returning mock-responses based on your OpenAPI definition. Read more about mocking: https://kubeshop.github.io/kusk-gateway/extension/#mocking

Since all operational configuration is in your OpenAPI definition you can easily automate the deployment of your APIs as part of a CI/CD/GitOps workflow - for example using ArgoCD or GitHub Actions.

Check out the announcement blog-post at https://kubeshop.io/blog/beta-1-release-of-kusk-gateway-openapi-driven-kubernetes-ingress-controller and head over to GitHub to get the release and read the docs - https://github.com/kubeshop/kusk-gateway.

Happy APIing!

Monokle 1.5.0 adds YAML templates and Istio/CertManager support

Ole Lensmar — Mon, 07 Feb 2022 14:55:34 +0000

Hello Kubernetes aficionados and YAML herders! We're happy to share the 1.5.0 release of our open-source desktop tool Monokle with a wealth of new features:

YAML Templates and Plugins
Istio/CertManager support
Improved Secret and NetworkPolicy editors
Improved resource validation
and more of everything else to boot!

Check out the full list of new features at https://medium.com/kubeshop-i/monokle-1-5-0-release-kubeshop-95f574563c79 and download the latest release/installers from GitHub - https://github.com/kubeshop/monokle - and be sure to let us know how it works for you - and how it can be made even better.

Thank you!

Monokle 1.4.0 improves K8s resource creation and editing

Ole Lensmar — Fri, 17 Dec 2021 09:43:48 +0000

Hi everyone - happy to share our recent Monokle release with a bunch of new features and bug-fixes primarily focused on the creation and editing of Kubernetes manifests without having to know any YAML (!)

Check out the full list of new features at https://medium.com/kubeshop-i/monokle-1-4-0-4122e88742c5 and download the latest release/installers from GitHub - https://github.com/kubeshop/monokle - and be sure to let us know how it works for you - and how it can be made even better..

Thank you!

Kusk Gateway - Configuring Ingress with OpenAPI

Ole Lensmar — Tue, 30 Nov 2021 10:26:46 +0000

Hello everyone!

We at Kubeshop have been investigating the feasibility of having an ingress controller that's configured using OpenAPI rather than Ingress resources.

Would this be something of interest to you?

The idea is that it will be completely self service for developers when updating the configuration that powers ingress.

Our thought process was basically OpenAPI is great for describing your API, so why not use it for also describing how these services are exposed to the world?

We developed an alpha open source product that implements this idea and are looking for people to evaluate it and give feedback. We have a handy example that takes ~10 minutes to get up and running for you to evaluate against.

We're quite proud of what we managed to make it do thus far - instead of copying and pasting the current features here, I will just link to a blog post we wrote which goes into more detail.

https://kubeshop.io/blog/configure-ingress-with-openapi

We also have official documentation here and you can check out the repo on Github here

We would greatly appreciate any feedback we receive and will allow us to develop it further to better suite the community.

Monokle 1.3.0 adds Cluster Compare and much more..

Ole Lensmar — Tue, 16 Nov 2021 09:39:32 +0000

We're thrilled to announce version 1.3.0 of our open-source tool Monokle - striving to make everyday tasks with k8s manifests, Kustomize and Helm a lot more easier.

The big feature in this release is Cluster-Compare - which allows you to compare a set of local resources (plain or generated with Kustomize/Helm) against your cluster.

A short demo is in order!

Cluster Compare allows you to:

easily see which of your local resources are different in the cluster
deploy your local resources to the cluster
replace your local resources with the ones from the cluster
compare the resources from Helm chart and Kustomize previews to the cluster resources

Download the release from Github

Read more about Cluster Compare and other 1.3.0 improvements on our blog

We're always looking for feedback - please join our Discard Server to get in touch - thanks!

TestKube 0.6.0

Ole Lensmar — Tue, 26 Oct 2021 07:16:30 +0000

We're happy to announce the version 0.6.0 of TestKube - an open-source test execution framework for Kubernetes. TestKube currently supports the execution of

Postman collections for testing your microservices/APIs
Cypress tests for testing your web UIs
Curl commands for basic health/functional testing

There is a very rudimentary dashboard for monitoring test executions and results - a demo version is running at https://demo.testkube.io

The project docs are at https://kubeshop.github.io/testkube/ - including installation instructions, etc.

The main GitHub repo is at https://github.com/kubeshop/testkube/

TestKube is still pretty early in its development, but the long term vision is to

Avoid vendor lock-in for test orchestration and execution in CI/CD pipelines
Make it easy to orchestrate and execute any kinds of tests without having to wrap them in docker-images or providing external network access
Make it possible to decouple test execution from build processes
Centralise all test results in a consistent format for "actionable QA analytics"

We would love to get your feedback; could this fit into your testing activities for applications running under kubernetes? If no - why not? If yes - what can we do to make it even better?

Great thanks in advance!

New tool for generating Ingress configurations from OpenAPI/Swagger

Ole Lensmar — Wed, 06 Oct 2021 09:59:44 +0000

If you're adopting an OpenAPI/Swagger first approach for your REST APIs running under K8s this one might be for you.

We've recently released Kusk - a tool for automatically generating Ingress configurations from an OpenAPI definition, including settings for things like CORS, timeouts and rate-limiting - all thanks to an x-kusk OpenAPI extension.

Kusk currently supports the following Ingress controllers:

Nginx-Ingress
Traefik 2.X
Ambassador 1.X / 2.X
Linkerd

Kusk makes your OpenAPI definition the source-of-truth for the deployment of your API and it works nicely with both manual and automated CI/CD workflows (ArgoCD, etc).

Check out the documentation for more details on all the above!

We'd greatly appreciate any feedback - so have a look and let us know what you think!