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Aptakube

Aptakube

Kubernetes Desktop Client

Aptakube
    "So I did what most developers do when they can't find a tool that fit their needs: I built my own!"— Guilherme Oenning
  • What is Aptakube?

    Simply put, Aptakube is a desktop client for Kubernetes. It's an app to help teams operate their Kubernetes clusters. It's like having the AWS console running on your desktop, but instead of managing AWS resources the app is focused Kubernetes and its ecosystem.

  • Who is behind Aptakube? Tell us a bit about yourself.

    Hey there! My name is Guilherme and I'm a full-time indie hacker. I was born in Brazil, but I'm currently based in the beautiful island of Ireland 🍀

    I worked for 15+ years as a software engineer before quitting my job to start a business. Nowadays I'm busy building and growing Aptakube, Aptabase, Fider and other side projects such as this website!

  • Why did you build Aptakube? How did you come up with the idea?

    I've worked with Kubernetes for a few years and I've always struggled to find a GUI client that I liked. I've tried many different options and I often found them to be slow, inresponsive and inneficient to work with multiple clusters.

    So I did what most developers do when they can't find a tool that fit their needs: I built my own!

  • Do you want to share some numbers? Downloads, users, MMR, whatever works for you!

    I'm operating on a very small and competitive niche, with loads of free alternatives. But I'm pretty happy with the results so far! There's been over 10.000 downloads of Aptakube since its first beta release. From a revenue perspective, its growing steadily! I'm able to pay for all my personal bills in just after 3 months after the official launch! I never expected to happen so soon!

  • Why Tauri? What made you choose it for this app?

    As I've worked with web development for so many years, I felt like Electron would be the best choice for me as I wouldn't have to learn a new language.

    I started coding with Electron, but I struggled a lot with the initial setup. There was just so many different scaffolder/templates to get stated, but they were all outdated, had too many unecessarity dependencies and overall just too complicated for me.

    It was around that time as well that Rust was trending and I read a tweet about Tauri 1.0 being released. To my surprise, it was an alternative to Electron built with Rust and Web Technologies.

    I decided to give it go and I was hooked from the very first moment. The Tauri team really nailed the Developer Experience. The CLI generated a fully working app with Vite + the UI framework of my choice. No templates to copy from GitHub. No extra dependencies. No garbage. Just a minimal web app packaged into this tiny macOS executable.

  • What do you dislike about Tauri? Would you choose a different framework if you had to start over?

    Tauri is still very young and there are very few tutorials and guides out there. Besides that, Rust is not the easiest language to learn, even for experienced developers. The learning curve was steep at the beginning, but I'm glad I stuck with it. I think choosing Tauri was the best decision I've made for Aptakube. The second best was using Solid.js 😉

    There are still a few features missing compared to Electron, so depending on what you want to do with your Desktop app, it might not yet be possible or at least not as easy as with Electron. On the other hand, Tauri 2.0 is just around the corner and it's going to support iOS and Android too! Which means I might be able to port Aptakube to mobile in the future, something that probably wound never be possible with Electron.

    So answering the question — No, I wouldn't change a thing!

    • This Q&A was published on April 2023.