Hey guys, Christian here. Today, let's

check out some of the new features in

the Docker and Kubernetes management

platform Portainer. Because Portainer

recently did a rebranding with new

colors, a new logo, but beyond the new

and shiny look of their website, they

also improved in some technical areas in

their management application. So, I

thought it's just about time that we

take a look together. Even though I

haven't really used Portainer a lot in

the recent past, but since I enabled the

Docker Swarm mode on some of my home lab

servers, by the way, check out the

Docker Swarm video if you haven't done

it already. There, I just realized

Portainer is a huge help because it's

great to manage Docker Swarm clusters.

And I've also tried out a few unexplored

features like the Portainer's Terraform

provider which brings some interesting

automation capabilities to that system

that really made me think if I should

use it more often in the future. We will

see. But at least I thought let's do a

quick run through together. Let's check

out the new features beyond the

rebranding and review some automation

features I haven't really covered yet on

my channel. And by the way, if you are

managing containers, clusters, and maybe

other services in your infrastructure,

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All right, guys. Let's check out the

rebranded Portainers website. Honestly,

I'm a little upset they didn't took the

chance to enable a dark mode by default,

but as you can see, they got a new logo.

They got new purple colors and a new

design. You can clearly see that they

shifted their focus a little more to the

enterprise field and the enterprise

customers with a big partnership to

Folkswagen, by the way, is a nice car,

and some other big partnerships and

brands. So you can definitely see they

follow a pattern here in the open-source

uh business community. More and more

companies are going into that direction.

They start with open-source projects

because they get a lot of funding. But

after a few years when they need to

become profitable, they start putting

some features behind pay walls and they

start uh introducing enterprise plans

and shift their focus a little into that

direction. However, my honest opinion

about this is I think it is still a fair

deal because they have the home and

student license for $150 a year, which

is similar to other offerings that you

will find. For example, unrade has a

similar license model. At the end of the

day, maintaining an application,

developing new features, hiring

engineers, and stuff like that just

costs money, so somebody needs to pay

it. And I think if they let the

enterprise companies pay the most money

and it gives us the ability with some

free community editions or home and

student licenses to get these cool

features and use it in our home lab

environment. Well, I think there's

nothing wrong about this. However, you

can really see they kind of like hide

their community edition a little though

it is still active of course. So if you

go to the main navigation, go to

resources and there you will find the

Portainer CE edition that brings us to

the git repository where we can find

instructions and you see the Portainer

community edition that is the

lightweight uh platform that is still

open source and you can still install

without any limitations in your home

lab. I personally I'm also using the

community edition and not the home and

student license. But you can really

decide for yourself if you want to use

the free community edition or you want

to pay for the home and student license

that has the same features as the

business one. So it's basically up to

you. Uh by the way if you want to

install Portainer or install the

community edition is also pretty uh

simple. You just go to their

documentation. So there you still find

the instructions how to set up a

Portainer community edition as a Docker

standalone version, Docker Swarm. Uh you

can even manage Potman though not all

features are supported there as far as I

know. But hey, at least you can do it if

you're preferring Portman over Docker.

And of course you can also install and

even manage Kubernetes. What is pretty

cool if you install Portainer, it

doesn't really matter where you install

it. If you install this as a standalone

container, Swarm, Potman or Kubernetes,

you can still manage all of these

environments from one central Portainer

instance. So I can show you when you go

to environments, you can just easily add

a new environment, then select the

environment you want to manage and then

start the wizard where you can select

between the different management

possibilities. either use the Portainer

agent which is definitely the

recommended way to manage any uh

environments but you can still connect

using the API or the docker socket

that's sometimes useful for standalone

containers or you can use the edge

agents so that is useful if you want to

manage environments where you can't

directly connect to so you deploy the

edge agent somewhere and then it

connects backwards to your Portainer's

instance otherwise the agent you will

initiate the connection from Portainer

to your environments. And here you can

find the commands in instructions. Just

copy the commands, deploy the agent on

your Docker Swarm cluster or your

Kubernetes cluster. And then add the

environment address where the Portainer

agent is accessible and it connects from

the management platform to that remote

environment. By the way, if you want to

have a tutorial about how to set up

Portainer yourself, you can refer to the

official documentation. But of course,

you can also check out my GitHub boiler

plates. So there I'm managing templates

to deploy Portainer in a standalone

Docker compos. And I'm currently also

working on some improvements for the

boiler plates to add some more

environments like Kubernetes or Docker

Swarm uh to deploy Portainer there as

well. Okay. But if you're already a

Portainer user, you will know all this

stuff. As you can see here, I'm

currently managing a Docker standalone

container, the server pro uh 7. I'm

managing a Kubernetes cluster and a

Docker Swarm cluster with that. So I'm

really managing every container

orchestration platform that I'm

deploying my home lab and I think this

is really great. Let me show you some of

the new features uh for Kubernetes

because their Portainer definitely had

some large room for improvement and they

really introduced some useful stuff

here. The most interesting one for me is

the new Helm chart integration. You can

easily now manage any Helm charts that

you have deployed on your Kubernetes

cluster. No matter if you have done that

from Portainer itself or if you're using

the Helm CLI tools or any other uh

deployment tools, you can still open

this. For example, when I go to my

assert manager Helm chart, you can see

all of the details here. Um, you can

upgrade to the latest version. You can

do roll backs and you can even inspect

some of the important stuff like the

resources like all of the objects that

this Helm chart has deployed on your

Kubernetes cluster. You can see and

inspect. You can even open them when you

click on describe and it will show you

the uh manifest of these objects. And

for troubleshooting, you can drill into

the events. You can also see the Helm

values of the chart. the custom values

that you have uh um deployed this chart

with. I think this is really incredibly

useful. Uh but you can also deselect the

userdefined ones. Then you see all of

the values that are possible and can

customize them, update the deployment

and yeah that is really great to manage

any application and then of course you

can even roll back to previous

revisions. So, Portainer really improved

a lot in Helmchart management. That

honestly made this uh platform a lot

more useful to me when managing my

Kubernetes cluster because I'm mostly

deploying everything in Helm charts. You

can also now see the ingress objects and

service objects. One thing that is a bit

unfortunate though, you only see the

Kubernetes standard ingress objects. You

don't see the traffic ingress objects.

So the ingress routes unfortunately

that's something that Portainer still

needs to improve. However, you can now

see most of the Kubernetes standard

resources like config secrets volumes

that was possible before but now you can

also see chron jobs and jobs service

accounts cluster roles and roles. So you

can really now drill into all of the

important resources in your cluster and

that is really great for Kubernetes

management. But uh Portainer also did

some great stuff when it comes to

container uh management with Docker. So

for both the swarm and the standalone, I

think these features to be fair have

been implemented in Portainer quite some

time ago. There was not so much new

stuff. However, because I just recently

became a new swarm fan or a swarm user,

um I haven't explored many of the swarm

features in Porta before because I

couldn't use them. But now since I

enabled Docker Swarm, I can now see all

of the swarm stacks. You can even see

the type here if it's swarm or compost.

What is pretty nice. What is still a bit

unfortunate in Portainer and I really

hate this that you still can't control

stacks or services that you have created

outside of Portainer. So you can see

them, you can uh inspect some of the

details, but you cannot make any edits

to this. Um that's still a limitation in

Portainer that really bothers me to be

honest. Um here you can see there is a

swarm stack that I have deployed using

Portainer. The there I have total

control. So I can uh go into all of the

details. I can edit uh all of the

details and redeploy it make updates and

so on. But that again is not possible

for any externally created stacks. And

that was really the one and only reason

why I didn't want to use Portainer a lot

in the past because sometimes I might

want to use automation tools like GitLab

CI where I'm executing some Docker CLI

commands or I'm using any other

automation tools to create my stacks and

then I can later not manage them in

Portainer. However, I think I found kind

of a solution to that because I recently

found the Portainer's Terraform provider

and Terraform is, as you might know from

watching some of my other videos, my

absolute favorite automation tool or

platform because there I'm managing many

many of my projects. And that kind of

solves the problem of when I'm using

GitLab CI/CD or other automation

pipelines, I can now use a standardized

tool to deploy my Docker compos stacks

or my Docker Swarm STS, but I still

later have total control over this. So I

think this is pretty cool and I thought

let me quickly show you how to do this

because it is really damn simple. By the

way, if you're not familiar with

Terraform, of course, I've made

tutorials about that. So definitely

check out my Terraform videos. then you

really know how to use this. But it's

actually not that difficult. You just

install the open tofu or terraform CLI

tools on your local device and then

create the providers file, initialize a

new project. Why not? Let's do this

quickly together. I think that's super

easy. So let's just uh create a new

directory. For example, let's deploy a

simple engineext uh server on my Docker

Swarm cluster using Terraform. So let's

CD into this and open this project. So

here we will always start with a

provider.tf. So this is the terraform

file where we just need to paste in the

provider main configuration. So let's

just grab that. And now in the

Portainers uh provider settings we of

course need to configure the

authentication. So we need the Portainer

endpoint. This is the main URL of the

Portainer instance. So in my case this

is Portainerome.creative.de.

Then we need the API key which we

usually don't want to store in clear

text in this terraform file. So

therefore I would create a new variable

called portainer API key which of course

has the type string and is uh sensitive.

Yes. And we can later on load this from

environment variables or when we create

a secrets do audo.tfvs

file. So these uh are variables that you

can exclude from your git repository and

will automatically be loaded into the

Terraforms uh project. So just use the

same variable name as you defined here

API key and then put your API key in

here. Of course I'm not going to show

this to you right now. By the way, if

you have trouble authenticating because

you're not using a trusted TLS

certificate, you can also set the skip

SSL verify to true. So then it's not

verifying the SSL certificate of your

Portainers instance because I'm using

traffic and trusted TLS certificates. Um

I can set this to false and then we have

everything uh to initialize the project.

So let's go back to the terminal. And uh

now it's depending on if you have

installed the terraform commands or if

you have installed open tofu which is a

fork of the previous open source version

of terraform. No because they changed to

this business available license again.

Let's not get into licensing. I've made

a separate video about open tofu. So

check that out if you want. But you can

use terraform or open tofu. It's mostly

kind of the same. So let's initialize a

new project that will now um create a

new terraform folder. download the

Portainers provider when you configured

everything correctly and once the

project has been successfully

initialized we can now start creating

our resources. So to do that let's go

back to the documentation here in the

resources you can see everything that

you can create through terraform. So you

can see there's really a lot can manage

Docker secrets for Docker Swarm. You can

manage Docker volumes with it. You can

even manage Kubernetes objects,

Kubernetes applications. So you can

install Helm charts through uh Portainer

when using the Terapform provider.

That's pretty cool. I really didn't know

that it was that capable. So I

absolutely love this. If you want to

deploy Docker standalone uh projects or

if you want to deploy uh Docker Swarm

stacks, you can use the Portainer stack

resource. So this works for both

standalone swarm or even kubernetes.

That is really nice. Here are some

examples for deploying docker standalone

stacks from a string. So you just uh

take this object and then you put your

compose file between these EOT uh

delimiters or what you can also do is

you can deploy this from a git

repository uh with automatic updates. So

that is really nice. If you change the

configuration on the Git repository, it

will pull down the latest versions and

automatically deploy this using

Portainer. But for now, I just want to

deploy a swarm stack uh using a simple

string. So here uh let's go to VS code.

Uh I'm usually creating a new file for

this uh just for easier management. So

Portainer stack.tf.

And here we can paste in the example.

And because I'm lazy, I'm just going to

let the GitHub copilot do this for me.

That's going to be a lot easier. Now,

one thing is uh something that you need

to adjust manually. That is the endpoint

ID. So, the endpoint ID is the unique

identifier of the Portainer environment

where you want to deploy this stack on.

So when we go back to the web interface

of Portainer and we go to environments

and you take a look at the address bar

you can see right after the endpoint

slash and number the 25 that is the

unique ID of the environment that we

have opened. So if we go back to VS code

just put in the number 25 and I think

that everything is all right. So yeah I

could now let AI deploy this for me but

I'm just going to show you how to do it

manually. it's probably be much more

valuable for a tutorial. So, let's first

of all run the tofu plan command. So,

that will tell me, okay, there's one

change. We want to deploy a new swarm

stack um to the environment 25. So,

let's just run the apply and confirm

this. Yes. And now it's communicating

with Portainer and it's creating the

Docker stack. Here you can see creation

was successful. If we now go back to

Portainer and select my docker swarm

cluster, we should see a new stack in

here. Here you can see this is the

engineext test one and you can also see

that we have total control over this

stack because we have deployed it using

Portainer just not the web UI but we've

used open tofu or terraform to automate

that for us and we can still go in here

we can delete the stack we can stop it

we have the editor to change anything

inside and of course you should not

really do this from the web UI if you're

using automation tools I know but I

think it is still great that you have

this uh full visibility of the services

and the stack configuration or the stack

file and you can now use any other

automation platform or any automation

tool using Terraform or open TUFU to

deploy anything or change anything on

your Portainer's configuration. That

honestly makes Portainer a lot more

attractive to me. The only problem of

course is if I for whatever reason want

to switch from Portainer to something

else. So I am probably even more into

this vendor lock in uh and dependent on

Portainer. So that's a decision you need

to make for yourself if you want to

build all your automation pipelines on

Portainer and trust this tool and use it

or if you prefer any other tools to

manage your environments. I personally

will use Portainer a lot more in the

future because of these automation

capabilities and it's making things a

lot easier for me. You can see how fast

it is to deploy anything in an automated

way. I really like this a lot. But

that's of course just my personal

opinion. Now I would like to hear yours.

So let me know in the comments what do

you think about the new Portainer after

the rebranding. Does it now have some

more interesting features? Do you like

the automation and stuff like that? I

would really love to hear from you. And

as always, thank you so much for

watching. Check out some of the other

videos on my channel. And thank you so

much for all the supporters. You guys

are really amazing. And of course, I'm

catching you all in the next video. and

take care. Bye-bye.