California-based Mirantis Acquires Lens

Based on publicly available data, some of the world's largest companies are using Lens to accelerate their Kubernetes efforts at scale, including Apple, Rakuten, Zendesk, TIM, and Adobe.

FREMONT, CA: Open cloud company Mirantis acquired Lens, a Kubernetes integrated development environment (IDE) open-source project from its authors, for an undisclosed amount. Multi-cluster management will become mainstream with the acquisition, thereby simplifying developers' experience working with Kubernetes and cloud-native applications. The acquisition follows Mirantis' acquisition of the team behind the product in February.

"Just like Visual Studio was a breakthrough for software developers, Lens is a game-changer for Kubernetes developers and operators. It makes writing, testing, and running Kubernetes apps easy and simple on any public or private cloud," said Adrian Ionel, Mirantis's CEO. "Lens fills a major gap in moving people from being interested in Kubernetes to being productive with Kubernetes."

Lens is available on GitHub under the MIT license and has been largely adopted since its launch as an open-source project in March 2020. The company has become one of the top trending open source projects in the cloud-native ecosystem, with a growing community of 35,000 users and 7,000 stargazers on GitHub. Based on publicly available data, some of the world's largest companies are using Lens to accelerate their Kubernetes efforts at scale, including Apple, Rakuten, Zendesk, TIM, and Adobe.

The acquisition will enable Mirantis to invest in Lens' future development while committing to continue working collaboratively with the Lens community and leading ecosystem players. Lens will remain free and open source. "Lens eliminates the Kubernetes complexity that has hindered mainstream developer adoption since its inception. The tool unlocks situational awareness and enables users to easily manage, develop, debug, monitor, and troubleshoot their workloads across multiple clusters in real-time," read a statement from Mirantis.

Mirantis uses a unique as-a-service model to deliver Kubernetes and related open-source software, empowering developers to build, share, and run their applications anywhere – from public cloud to hybrid cloud to the edge. The company serves many of the world's leading enterprises, including Adobe, Cox Communications, DocuSign, Liberty Mutual, PayPal, Reliance Jio, Splunk, STC, Vodafone, and Volkswagen.