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Modern Kubernetes Visualization using Radar

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Over the years, many graphical user interfaces have appeared for Kubernetes, but only a few continue to be actively maintained and developed. While I prefer the standard kubectl CLI for basic interactions with a Kubernetes (k8s) cluster, a visual representation can be extremely helpful for troubleshooting and debugging.

Headlamp was my go to UI tool for k8s, which provides a simliar user experience to many of the previous Kubernetes visualization tools, nothing fancy but it gets the job done.

I recently discovered another OSS Kubernetes visualization tool called Radar, which aims to fill some of the gaps left by existing tools on the market. I was a bit skeptical as this could just be another "modern" tool until the next one is built, but I figured I would give it a try!


At first glance, it has a much cleaner, modern look and feel after I connected it to my vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) cluster. The homepage provides a summary of all the expected datapoints including versioning, resource utilization, deployment details, and the health of components and workloads.

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Enabling new vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) Cluster Management for VCF Automation (VCFA)

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As of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0.1, users can now manage the full lifecycle of their vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) Clusters, including backup and restore, using the new vSphere Kubernetes Service Cluster Management (VKSM) capability, natively integrated into VCF Automation (VCFA).


This is definitely a must have capability for users managing dozen or even hundreds of VKS Clusters across different versions, VKSM provides the easy button for platform operators!

I figured before going on PTO next week and shutting down my lab, this would be the perfect time to get this deployed in my lab ... what could go wrong, right!? 😅

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Quick Tip - Configuring vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) Cluster with self-signed container registry

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Over the weekend, I had finished building a small container application that I had developed on my local desktop, which worked great. However, the real test was to deploy the application on a vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) Cluster, which would require the container image to be hosted in a container registry.

Rather than using a public container registry, like many organizations, you typically would setup an internal registry that your infrastructure could have access to. Harbor is my go to container registry and is extremely simple to setup as it uses docker-compose under the hood.

After uploading my container image to Harbor, if you try to deploy it to your VKS Cluster, you will immediately see the following image pull error:

tls: failed to verify certificate: x509: certificate signed by unknown authority


Just like any system that attempts to connect to an endpoint with a self-signed TLS certificate that it can not verify, it will not trust which is the default behavior.

For our VKS Cluster to be able to successfully pull an image from Harbor with a self-signed TLS certificate, we need to add the trusted CA to our vSphere Namespace and then reference that as part of our VKS Cluster deployment.

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