Five Years of Kubernetes Dashboard: A Retrospective on Its Evolution

In October 2020, the Kubernetes Dashboard officially celebrated its fifth anniversary. As the main project maintainers, we can hardly believe that so much time has passed since our first commit. However, when we look back with a bit of nostalgia, we realize that a lot has happened during this time. It’s time to celebrate “our baby” with a brief retrospective.

How It All Began

The original idea behind the Kubernetes Dashboard was to provide a web interface for Kubernetes. We wanted to reflect the functionalities of kubectl in an intuitive web UI. The main advantage of using the UI is that you can quickly identify things that aren’t working as expected (monitoring and troubleshooting). Additionally, the Kubernetes Dashboard is a great starting point for users new to the Kubernetes ecosystem.

The very first commit to the Kubernetes Dashboard was made on October 16, 2015, by Filip Grządkowski from Google—just a few months after the first commit in the Kubernetes repository. Our first commits date back to November 2015 (Sebastian committed on November 16, 2015; Marcin committed on November 23, 2015). Since then, we have become regular contributors to the project. Over the next two years, we worked closely with the Googlers and eventually became the main project maintainers ourselves.

As you can see, the original look and feel of the project was completely different from today. We have changed the design multiple times. The same applies to the code itself.

Growing Up - The Great Migration

At the beginning of 2018, we reached a point where AngularJS was nearing the end of its lifecycle, while new Angular versions were being released regularly. Many of the libraries and modules we used followed this trend. This forced us to spend a significant amount of time rewriting the frontend part of the project to make it compatible with newer technologies.

The migration brought many benefits, such as refactoring a large portion of the code, introducing design patterns, reducing code complexity, and utilizing new modules. But you can imagine that the scope of the migration was enormous. Fortunately, there were numerous contributions from the community that helped us with resource support, support for new Kubernetes versions, i18n, and much more. After many long days and nights, we finally released the first beta version in July 2019, followed by version 2.0 in April 2020—our baby had grown up.

The development of the Kubernetes Dashboard is an excellent example of the innovation and adaptability of the Kubernetes community. ayedo is proud to be a partner in the Kubernetes world, supporting companies in making the most of Kubernetes.

Source: Kubernetes Blog