Managing Kubernetes shouldn’t be hard.

In the previous article, we talked about managed Kubernetes platform, but I understand not everyone is ready to go for it. You may have compliance, regulatory, or specific requirements to manage Kubernetes on-premises.

In this article, you will learn about different Kubernetes management tools you can use to manage Kubernetes clusters with ease.

In the emerging cloud-native landscape, Kubernetes is everywhere without a doubt. It has become the standard for orchestrating containers. But managing multiple Kubernetes clusters, which must run everywhere in a consistent and secure way, presents a new set of challenges. Therefore, the need of Kubernetes management tools arises.

Let’s explore some of the popular solutions to manage Kubernetes efficiently.

K9s

k9s is a terminal-based resource dashboard. It has only a command-line interface. Whatever you do on Kubernetes dashboard web UI, you can do the same using this terminal k9s dashboard utility also.

It keeps an eye on the Kubernetes cluster continuously and offers commands to work with defined resources on the cluster.

Below are K9s features:

• Real-time tracking of the cluster
• Customize view using K9s skins
• Easy traversal through Kubernetes resources
• Drill down options to check cluster resource issues
• Provides extended plugins to create your own commands

Rancher

Rancher is an open-source container management platform that makes it easy for any enterprise to adopt Kubernetes. You can deploy and manage cloud-hosted Kubernetes clusters running in GKE (GCP), EKS (AWS), AKS (Azure), or you can just deploy Kubernetes on your choice of VMs or bare metal infrastructure.

Rancher simplifies all the operational responsibilities of the administrator, including:

• Monitoring the health of your clusters
• Setting up alerts and notifications
• Enabling centralized Logging
• Defining and applying global security policies
• Establishing authentication and enforcing our back policies
• Managing and scaling your infrastructure

As Kubernetes adoption accelerates across your company, rancher encourages the rapid adoption of giving users access directly to Kubernetes API and CLI. Rancher’s new intelligent interface simplifies application management; teams can easily deploy and manage workloads, defined Secrets and manage private registries, configure persistent volume claims, configure load balancing and service discovery, manage CI pipelines.

Dashboard + Kubectl + Kubeadm

The Kubernetes dashboard is a web-based interface to deploy containerized applications. It troubleshoots your applications and manages the cluster itself along with the resources.

You can use the dashboard to get an overview of the applications running on your cluster as well as creating or modifying individual Kubernetes resources such as deployments jobs, replica sets, and many more.

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