Say Hello to Monokle Cloud

## Hello Monokle Cloud!

The Monokle team is extremely proud to announce the initial release of Monokle Cloud - a browser based version of Monokle Desktop; a popular open-source tool for authoring, analysis and deployment of Kubernetes configurations.

Monokle Cloud helps Developers, DevOps and Platform Engineers improve the quality of their Kubernetes deployments by providing powerful features of Monokle Desktop for free in any modern browser. Monokle Cloud integrates tightly with GitHub to increase productivity and cross-functional collaboration through sharing capabilities promoting faster and easier peer previews, comparisons, and validations.

Let’s do a quick run-down of what we’re so excited about!

## What is Monokle Cloud? 

Monokle Cloud is a free, browser-based tool for exploring and analyzing Kubernetes configurations and optimizing GitOps workflows.

What differentiates Monokle from other tools is its focus on helping you define the desired state of your Kubernetes applications in an easy to visualize and collaborate way before the actual “going live” happens, which is key to achieving a successful and high-quality deployment.

## Who is Monokle Cloud for?

Monokle Cloud is for any engineer working with Kubernetes configurations stored on GitHub - be it simple YAML deployments to full GitOps repositories. 

## How does it make your Kubernetes / GitOps life easier?

Monokle Cloud offers functionality that helps teams improve the quality of their Kubernetes configurations and streamline pre-deployment workflows:

- Navigate and understand your Kubernetes resources and their dependencies

- Validate your Kubernetes configurations against OPA policies, JSON schemas and resource constraints.

- Preview and validate the output of Helm and Kustomize

- Compare complete sets of Kubernetes configurations across branches, commits and previews

- Collaborate with stakeholders by integrating with GitHub and allowing you to share direct links to any of your findings

## How does Monokle Cloud integrate with GitHub?

Monokle Cloud integrates with GitHub in several ways:

- All features mentioned above are available for any public GitHub repository

- Actions for opening the GitHub editor or creating GitHub issues for validation errors are integrated into the Monokle Cloud interface

- A GitHub action for validating all aspects of your Kubernetes resources as part of your GitHub workflows is available on GitHub - https://github.com/kubeshop/monokle-action

- A Chrome Extension that injects Monokle Cloud actions into the GitHub user-interface is available on GitHub (and soon on the Chrome Store) - https://github.com/kubeshop/monokle-chrome-extension

## Intrigued? Of course you are!

Watch this 3 minute video by one of our lead engineers, Wito Delnat, for a walkthrough and see for yourself how Monokle Cloud helps make Kubernetes configuration management quick and easy.

Or try out one of the direct links below to see Monokle Cloud in action:

- [The default branch of the opencost repository](https://app.monokle.com/explore/github/opencost/opencost?view=explorer)

- The output of Kustomize for the helloWorld kustomization in the official kustomize repository

- The output of Helm for the MariaDB Helm Chart in our demo repository

- Comparison of two release branches in the argo-cd repository

(You will be asked to sign-in to Monokle Cloud at least once…) 

## Where can I get Monokle Cloud? 

1. Go to app.monokle.com using a modern browser (Chrome, Safari, Edge, Firefox)

2. Sign-in with your GitHub account (we only ask for minimal permissions)

3. Select or Copy and Paste the url of any public GitHub repository containing Kubernetes configurations into Monokle Cloud

And that's it!

## Questions? Suggestions? Get in touch!

Head over to the #monokle-cloud channel on our Discord server to get in touch, report issues, ask for features, talk about the weather, etc - we’d love to hear from you!