As platform engineers, we are responsible for our Internal Developer Platform(IDP), and one of the ultimate goals of IDP is to enable true self-service for application developers. Drawing from our experience managing a large scale Internal Developer Platform at Ant Group, we recognized an undeniable truth: having visibility (the capability to access and monitor data) and insight (the skill to glean valuable information from that data) is absolutely critical for fostering a self-service development environment. After all, trying to understand and diagnose issues without any information is like flying blind.
We have used several kubernetes visualization tools over time, such as Lens, k9s, kube-explorer, and the kubernetes dashboard, among others. Some are commercialized, some do not support self-host, and some are rudimentary for production needs… In short, we have not yet encountered a product that we are completely satisfied with.
Some of the features Karpor already supports are:
- Customized logical views to fit the resource organization models for different scenarios, such as applications, environments, etc, which may have different interpretations at places.
- Intuitive and effective search, providing a number of user-friendly ways to locate resources across clusters, such as keywords, SQL, and natural language.
- Cross-cluster topological views, providing a global perspective of resources no matter where they are.
- Low cognitive burden, it is read-only, non-invasive to the cluster it’s watching, and users can deploy it to their private environments with one click.
- Discover potential risks through compliance reports.
All features are available via GUI. You can also play with Karpor API to do more things.
Currently, we are focused on resource timeline, problem diagnose and integrations with more tools like k8sgpt, aiming to bring much more interesting abilities to developers. Here is the complete roadmap (https://www.kusionstack.io/karpor/roadmap/).
Thanks a lot for taking the time to read! We'd greatly appreciate any feedback you have and hope you get the chance to try out Karpor.
