“We’re launching a new application management platform,” said the developer innovation lead… some people called him/her an advocate, some knew them as an evangelist, but those in the know just referred to this person as a code construct guru who knew a scope resolution operator from a grilled cheese sandwich.

“Sounds nifty,” said the departmental boss, with an air of practiced detachment that kind of said ‘play with your new software tools and come up with stuff all you like, just don’t expect any additional corporate funding or major interest from the CEO.

“Just app management, don’t we already have that?” probed the boss.

“Okay yes sorry, it’s an application discovery & observability platform with a key emphasis on security as well,” said the developer.

“Well okay, just get on with it… and if you do launch it, why not call it Project Starfish or Operation Banjo – you can have those on me, for free,” quipped the boss, who by now realized it was time for lunch and that Dino’s Grill had a special in Cuban cheese melts.

“Yeah, we like those, but because this is all about observability, we kind of thought about calling it Lens… you know, like… a window into clear sight and all that kind of thing,” said the developer, who also happened to like Cuban sandwiches, but that was where their affinity with the management tier stopped.

A wider lens at Mirantis

Purely a fanciful tale or product marketing or the kind of thing that has actually happened? Who knows… but what we do know is that Mirantis has announced that it has acquired the Santa Clara-based Shipa to add automated application discovery, operations, security and observability to its Lens Kubernetes Platform.

Lens is said to help eliminate Kubernetes complexity – and you can take that as another way of saying it helps ‘accelerate mainstream developer adoption’, given that the K of Kubernetes is all to often followed by the C of complexity.

This technology is intended to allow software application development professionals to manage, develop, debug, monitor and troubleshoot their workloads across multiple clusters in real-time, supporting any certified Kubernetes distribution, on any infrastructure.

Ship’s technology brings application intelligence and awareness to Lens, thus making it easier for Kubernetes developers (we could also call them ‘app owners’, after a fashion) to run, optimize, secure and support their applications.

Dependency maps & run books

Users (by which we still mean developers, not users) can see how their apps and microservices are deployed and also get a graphical view of network connections and map(s) – plural- of application dependencies. Software engineers can create and share ‘run books’ tuned to their needs, building on a library of certified templates for a variety of use cases and security requirements.

“Our goal at Shipa, from the beginning, was to give DevOps and platform engineering teams the capability to choose their own underlying tools with a focus on automation to reduce the complexity of the technology infrastructure required by cloud-native applications,” said Bruno Andrade, co-founder and CEO of Shipa. “Our technology makes deployment and management of applications and updates much easier and faster by letting developers focus on what they do best and not infrastructure.”

Shipa, like Lens, aims to reduce complexity – therefore shielding developers from having to know the intricacies of Kubernetes – helping to deliver and manage applications faster while improving security and governance, as well as making updates easier.

“Shipa’s technology puts application discovery, optimization, security and management capabilities in the hands of Lens users,” said Adrian Ionel, co-founder and CEO of Mirantis. “It will help cloud-native software teams move even faster, freeing them to code and innovate.”

In its current form then, Mirantis may be justified in claiming that Lens lowers the barrier of entry for those just getting started with Kubernetes and improves productivity for people with more experience. The technology has more than 20,000 stars on GitHub, with an installed base of one million – a statistic which Mirantis claims makes Lens the most popular integrated development environment (IDE) for Kubernetes today.

The integration with Lens provides visibility into applications with security policies applied consistently from CI/CD or GitOps pipelines. Shipa provides visibility over application services, ownership, resource consumption, policy compliance, service communication etc. Management of applications is done independently of infrastructure with connections to incident management tools, vulnerability scanners, as well as integrations with Terraform, Slack and GitHub Actions.

In addition to all of the above, Shipa will be integrated with Mirantis Kubernetes Engine (MKE), the industry-leading container orchestration platform for developing and running modern applications at scale, on private clouds, public clouds and on bare metal.

About Adrian Bridgwater

Adrian Bridgwater is a freelance journalist and corporate content creation specialist focusing on cross platform software application development as well as all related aspects software engineering, project management and technology as a whole. Adrian is a regular writer and blogger with Computer Weekly and others covering the application development landscape to detail the movers, shakers and start-ups that make the industry the vibrant place that it is. His journalistic creed is to bring forward-thinking, impartial, technology editorial to a professional (and hobbyist) software audience around the world. His mission is to objectively inform, educate and challenge - and through this champion better coding capabilities and ultimately better software engineering.