In February, Mirantis Inc. acquired Kontena Inc., the company behind Lens, a popular Kubernetes integrated development environment. Tracking its development even before Mirantis’ acquisition was  Matti Paksula (pictured), founder and chief technology officer of Supervisor.com. He watched Kontena grow Lens as a very early adopter of the environment.

“I’d been working with those guys from 2015 or so,” Paksula said. “I was … one of the first outside users, or probably the first user outside of the company.”

So what does Paksula have to say about the way his company uses Lens, and how the customer perspective has been impacted by the acquisition? Paksula spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the Mirantis Launchpad event, to discuss Lens’ transition to Mirantis, and its journey as an open-source technology. (* Disclosure below.)

Using Lens to help run Supervisor.com

Supervisor.com is a website that helps organizations test their websites to ensure they can handle large amounts of traffic without crashing on a given day of significance, such as Black Friday or a new product launch. Supervisor.com, which uses robots that act like real people to actually click, scroll, add products or anything a real user would do, uses Lens for Kubernetes clusters management. Lens makes everything visual for the customer to navigate Kubernetes clusters in real time, according to Paksula. He also chose it for its integrated metrics and the Lens benefits for debugging.

“[Kontena] felt like Kubernetes is super hard to visualize or understand what’s going on because you have these containers flying around, you have nodes going in going out. So they built Lens,” Paksula explained. “Lens makes everything real time … and I think that’s a huge productivity boost.”

In the very early days, Lens had some performance issues, according to Paksula. But now, it’s extremely stable and handles big workloads very well. Supervisor.com itself runs about 10,000 pods in the environment. Paksula believes that Mirantis has offered the right kind of home for the product and will help take Lens to the next step for developers through the open-source options, as well as commercially through options such as authentication.

“They really get what’s happening in the space,” Paksula concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Mirantis Launchpad event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Mirantis Launchpad 2020. Neither Mirantis Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE