We will discuss how the Kubernetes dashboard by Devtron can be leveraged for cluster management and how it brings immense value to all organizations' developers, DevOps, and SRE/Ops teams.
This blog is the second part of the Kubernetes Dashboard blog series. Read part 3 on the Kubernetes Helm Release management to experience how easy it is for all organizations' developers and DevOps teams to manage the Helm App lifecycle. Read Part 1 on Kubernetes Dashboard for Application Management to witness the ease of deploying apps onto Kubernetes on day 1.
Devtron, an open-source Kubernetes-native application management platform, has introduced the Kubernetes dashboard for easy application management from a UI. Various teams can get a single-plane visibility of all resources across clusters and can edit, deploy or troubleshoot them from the UI.
What is K8s Cluster management?
Kubernetes cluster management is how an Ops team manages a group of Kubernetes clusters. With more microservices migrated to the cloud and containers, Kubernetes clusters are becoming more distributed and complicated to manage. Secondly, many microservices will be deployed into multiple clusters dedicated to various environments such as dev, test, pre-prod, and prod. For efficient operation, these clusters must be maintained at regular intervals for seamless deployment and delivery of applications.
Challenges of Kubernetes cluster management
Managing and maintaining multiple clusters in the software delivery process is difficult, especially when they are spread across different cloud providers and private data centers. Following are a few challenges that the Ops team face during the cluster management process.
High cost of maintaining multiple clusters and nodes in time
A cost-effective solution for IT organizations is to create dev and test environment clusters in local data centers and choose production clusters in public clouds like AWS or GCP. With time, multiple microservices will be built and deployed, and accordingly, the number of clusters also increases. Without a centralized tool, the Ops team doesn't get a consolidated view of which cluster needs attention in a particular time period. If they don’t proactively manage the cluster, there are chances of overutilizing resources, resulting in a huge cloud bill.
Dependent on experts
Kubernetes is still a new technology and few experts can manage infrastructure. Only a few experts can easily perform cluster management tasks, such as creating, updating, and deleting Kubernetes clusters across multiple private and public clouds or quickly troubleshooting and resolving issues across your federated domain.
The use of CLI is not scalable
The Ops team might like to use the kubectl command for a few clusters. It can appear as fun to fetch data of resource utilization and take action from the CLI initially. But with time when multiple clusters have to be managed on time, kubectl is not a scalable solution. Applying policies, carrying out node operations such as health checks, taint or cordon, and troubleshooting is time-consuming work through CLI. Additionally, it often involves a learning curve and Ops teams don't enjoy any part of it.
Devtron has launched the open-source Kubernetes dashboard for cluster management to overcome all these challenges.
Kubernetes dashboard for effective cluster management
Cluster Management with Devtron
360° visibility of multiple clusters
Devtron Kubernetes dashboard allows users to see all the clusters across the enterprise in one plane. They can see the number of nodes in each cluster and the total CPU and memory allocated. DevOps and Ops leads can quickly visualize the resources deployed across clusters, and nodes of each cluster, and make informed decisions like cordoning or deleting a node to save cloud costs.
Node Insights
The ops team can drill down into each cluster and find the granular details of all the nodes. They can visualize the status of each node along with other information such as roles, K8s versions, number of pods running, labels, annotations, resources, etc. The best part is the Ops team can see the resource utilization metrics such as CPU request, memory request, and namespace of each pod in a node. Devtron also helps during the Cluster upgrade process, by comparing the existing API versions with the newer ones, and informs you about any breaking changes.
Devtron also let's you fetch and visualize data from a observability tools such as Grafana. Rather than having to jump through multiple Grafana dashboards, and run custom queries multiple times, Devtron let's you get all the essential metrics in a single pane of glass view. These metrics can be use to quickly gain useful insights into your cluster.
Node Operation
Devtron dashboard allows Ops and Admins team to choose a node and carry out maintenance work such as delete, edit configurations, drain, taint, or cordon. They carry out these node operation duties easily with the click of a button from the UI. So Kubernetes admins and Ops team don’t have to learn and use Kubectl all the time for setting any taint & toleration, making nodes unschedulable, or any other node operations.
Troubleshooting
Devtron Kubernetes dashboard allows Ops or admins folks to access the cluster resources from the terminal. You can troubleshoot and debug errors with the help of tools such as Kubectl, HELM, curl, busybox, and other utilities - already provided by Devtron for Ubuntu, Alpine, and CentOS. Devtron provides you the facility to change the namespace and shell (bash/ssh) from the UI itself.
Devtron Kubernetes dashboard also provides real-time visibility into node conditions such as Network unavailability, memory pressure, or disk pressure so that you can take immediate actions. Similarly, you can also edit your node YAML to configure your node like adding labels, or annotation, increasing CPU or memory limits.
Guaranteed outcomes of Devtron Kubernetes dashboard
With the Kubernetes dashboard, you can improve Kubernetes admin and Ops team productivity in managing Kubernetes cluster, and reduce mean time to resolve issues with central plane visibility and controls of all nodes across clusters.
Kubernetes Dashboard Ecosystem
Open source Devtron Kubernetes dashboard is available in different deployment options on-prem and managed. Recently Devtron has also released a desktop client version for the Kubernetes dashboard that can help you manage your k8s resources and multi-clusters.
