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Show HN: I quit my job to build a Kubernetes GUI with Rust (aptakube.com)

12 points by goenning ↗ HN
About a year ago I was working on a project with mirrored Kubernetes clusters deployed across various regions. Constantly switching contexts was a big pain for me and I badly needed something more practical to work with multiple clusters, ideally simultaneously.

At that time everyone was talking about Rust and I really wanted to try it out. I then found Tauri, a framework to build GUI apps with Rust + JavaScript. I was sold. I learned Rust and built the app I always wanted to use. Fast, lightweight and with the ability to connect to multiple clusters simultaneously.

Fast forward to today, there’s a few thousand users and I’ve quit my job to go all in on this product.

Would love to get you to try the app and share your feedback. It would mean a lot to me!

Thanks!

14 comments

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calculated
Some actionable advice you can take into consideration is that instead of giving a trial period make it so that customers can get a 30 day refund.
goenning
I think that could work well for cheap B2C products, but it could be difficult to get businesses to buy without trying it out first. Especially when you consider the often bureaucratic procurement process.

The strategy I've been using so far is to get people to try the app and ask their employer to buy the licenses.

SkyLinx
I’m probably not going to try it because while it sounds interesting it seems expensive for me considering that there are free tools already available. How does this compare to Rancher for example?
goenning
Thanks for the comment! It's more of an alternative to Lens/K9s than it is to Rancher. You get to see and manage the resources from all your clusters in one view without having to install anything on the clusters.
SkyLinx
If its similar to k9s and lens what sets it apart? Please don’t get upset from my questions, it’s not my intention. I am genuinely just wondering why I would pay for this tool when there are similar tools that are free to use. I actually tried your tool not long ago - I remembered now from the screenshot. At the time it didn’t support proxies if I remember correctly and I didn’t really see anything that would make me switch from k9s (my current favorite because I’m very fast using it with the keyboard). Perhaps I will try it again to see what’s changed.
goenning
Not upset at all, I totally understand where you're coming from :)

The biggest difference between k9s and Aptakube is the multi-cluster connectivity and a more user-friendly resource view that is not YAML/Describe.

Socks/HTTP proxies are supported now! And keyboard navigation got better in 1.4 thanks to the command palette, but there's a lot more to do to make it super keyboard friendly (coming soon!)

What I've learned after building multiple products (in different crowded niches) is that everyone has their preferences. I have a lot of customers who migrated from K9s/Lens because they preferred Aptakube. You just have to find what works for you, which in your case might be k9s :)

hacker79
`The multi-cluster connectivity and a more intuitive resource interface` may not appear to offer significant advantages. These features may not provide sufficient incentive for users to switch from K9 from example which is highly documented, available resources over the internet and so on.

The features your are targeting does not seem why I would switch. I think it needs more reason why there is yet another tool on it. Just wanted to give my feedback, no intention to downplay it.

Best of Luck

goenning
Thanks! That's actually good feedback :)
SkyLinx
Ah, it asks me for a license saying that my trial expired on in January, when I tried it. Is there any way I can try it again to see what's changed?
quickthrower2
What are the advantages over OpenLens?
goenning
From a feature perspective, with Aptakube you can connect to multiple cluster simultaneously, stream logs from multiple pods simultaneously (like logs from all pods in a deployment) and support for metrics-server. Also metrics are shown on the table so you can sort by CPU/Mem usage.

From a tech perspective, the app starts quicker and feels much faster, overall less memory usage and reduced load on etcd due to use of api server cache.

It’s free to try, so give it a go. It might not be your thing, and that’s ok. But at least you’d have seen for yourself :)

quickthrower2
Thanks. Logs from all pods in a deployment is a good one. That is something I wished lens did, and often I would manually open 6 sessions (there is probably some fancy bash script that would do that?).

Will give it a go!