Mirantis Lens Control Center simplifies secure Kubernetes deployments

Mirantis announced Lens Control Center, to enable large businesses to centrally manage Lens Pro deployments by standardizing configurations, consolidating billing, and enabling control over outbound network connections for greater security.

Over 1 million people use Lens to make them significantly more productive when developing Kubernetes applications and more efficient operating Kubernetes. Lens is a desktop application that lowers the barrier of entry for those just getting started with Kubernetes and radically improves productivity for people with more experience.

The largest and most advanced Kubernetes platform in the world, it empowers users to easily manage, develop, debug, monitor, and troubleshoot their workloads across multiple clusters in real-time, with support for any certified Kubernetes distribution, on any infrastructure. The Lens desktop application delivers an intuitive graphical user interface and works with Linux, macOS, and Windows operating systems. Lens is built on open source and has over 20,000 stars on GitHub.

In mid-2022, Lens Pro was introduced with features for enterprise users that simplify the developer and operators experience working with Kubernetes. Since launching Lens Pro, thousands of organizations have come to rely on Lens to remove complexity, speed up developer onboarding, and improve productivity for cloud native developers and operators. Lens is used in place of an assortment of other tools including editors, dashboards, and web consoles.

“Lens has a wide profile of users that include individuals and small teams who are easily able to manage their Lens Pro subscriptions and security configurations, but we have heard from our large enterprise customers that they need greater levels of centralized control management and support for their security needs,” said Miska Kaipiainen, VP of product engineering, Mirantis.

“Lens Control Center enables those with large deployments to centralize and manage their security needs, plus ensure that users have the appropriate licenses and levels of access to be most effective,” added Kaipiainen.

Lens Control Center now delivers the following features.

• Enterprise Single Sign-On (SSO) integration: Lens Control Center adds support for SAML and OIDC so that enterprise users can conveniently and securely access Lens with corporate login credentials provided by other systems, such as Okta, Azure, or Active Directory.
• Centralized management: Allows enterprises to have centralized control to standardize configurations and enable or disable Lens Pro features, across users to ensure a consistent experience.
• Control over network connections: Lens Control Center provides the ability to restrict Lens from connecting to the internet for all outbound traffic to align with network security policies, for example in highly-regulated businesses where this is necessary.
• Account hierarchy with consolidated billing: Departments can manage their Lens feature configurations while consolidating billing to the parent organization. This also applies to Mirantis partners who have a consolidated overview of their customer accounts for easier management.