Kubeapps 2.0: Empowering Kubernetes users with a new UI and multi cluster support

The new Kubeapps major release is here and full of outstanding changes that make it easier than ever to deploy and manage apps on your Kubernetes clusters. Over the last year, each release has added new and important features such as the support for private Helm and Docker registries, adding operators, making easier to modify the default values in deployments, and allowing the creation of application repositories to deploy custom applications from private repositories.

This release consolidated those changes and adds an essential feature for both developers and administrators: enabling people to deploy and manage their apps across multiple Kubernetes clusters. 

Now, all of this is wrapped into a completely revamped UI focused on simplicity and usefulness.

Want to learn more? Keep reading to discover the new Kubeapps features that will help your team boost its performance while deploying applications in production. 

Support for Multi-cluster Environments

As organizations are gradually adopting the model of deploying multiple Kubernetes clusters to improve availability, isolation, and scalability, offering support for multi-cluster environments in Kubeapps was a must.

Kubeapps always offered the possibility of selecting the cluster namespace in which you want to deploy applications, but now, it extends that feature to enable users to select the cluster on which you want to deploy and manage your applications.

With the support of multi-cluster deployments through the Kubeapps UI, users will benefit from:

• Being able to install and manage their applications across multiple clusters.
• Configuring which clusters are available for Kubeapps installation (clusters must support OIDC authentication).
• Team or project isolation: Each team runs its own set of clusters with their Kubeapps configured for those clusters only and deploy its own set of applications.
• Simplicity in cluster management thanks to the use of separated views depending on the cluster and the selected namespace.

Navigating across the different contexts sets in your environment is as easy as selecting the cluster from the list of available clusters and the namespace you want to check. Then click “Change Context” and start deploying Helm charts and Operators in the selected context.