As flexible and powerful as kubectl can be, a graphical UI can make the interaction with Kubernetes resources more guided, informative, and accessible. So it's not surprising that there are a number of GUI tools or dashboards around Kubernetes to choose from.

But what if we need to offer just a custom behavior or feature for a specific Kubernetes-related tool? Surely we can implement its own GUI, but that often implies also adding some of that basic functionality that also overlaps with other tools, besides of course all the work of maintaining, promoting, and distributing this new graphical application.

A solution to the mentioned problem is what we try to offer with Headlamp, the extensible Kubernetes UI. By default it offers a lot of the basic functionality you expect in any Kubernetes UI, like listing/viewing resources, and its UI/functionality can be extended by using plugins. This way, any tools or projects that need to offer custom user-experiences can skip all the basic functionality already covered by Headlamp, and focus just on their goals.

In this webinar, I will introduce Headlamp, our motivation for creating it, how we build it, and show how others can leverage it to offer custom user experiences for their Kubernetes users.