News

Microsoft Offers Tool to Simplify Kubernetes with Visual Studio

• By David Ramel
• 06/11/2018

Kubernetes seems to be following the popularity path of Docker in the container space, increasingly becoming the tool of choice for container orchestration.

In the latest example of that, Microsoft has announced Kubernetes tool for use in its flagship IDE, Visual Studio.

The company said it published the tool -- still in preview stage -- to better support developers who are building containerized applications that target Kubernetes in Visual Studio.

Although new to the Visual Studio Marketplace, Visual Studio Code Kubernetes Tools has already been installed more than 54,000 times.

That speaks to the popularity of the open source Kubernetes project, increasingly used for automating deployment, scaling and management of containerized applications.

In a blog post last week, Microsoft mentioned that burgeoning popularity and detailed how to use the new preview tool, which comes with a number of pre-requisites that are explained in developer guidance.

"With the tools installed, you can create a new “Container Application for Kubernetes” project, or add Kubernetes support to an existing .NET Core web application," said Lisa Guthrie, program manager, Azure Developer Experience. "When you do this, Visual Studio will automatically create a Dockerfile and a Helm chart for your project. You can easily create a container image to run your application, or use these files to deploy to any Kubernetes cluster. These tools will also integrate with Azure Dev Spaces, which provides a rapid, iterative development experience right in Azure Kubernetes Service."

Parked on GitHub since January, the preview tool shows 13 contributors and 85 stars. GitHub said the tool was created by combining the vs-kubernetes extension by @brendandburns and the vs-helm extension by @technosophos. Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes.

The nascent preview has thus far earned a perfect 5.0 rating so far from just five developers, according to its site on the Visual Studio Marketplace.

Guthrie said the tool was created to simplify the Visual Studio experience after getting feedback from developers.

"Here on the Visual Studio team, we are working on ways to better support developers who are building containerized applications that target Kubernetes," she said. "In talking to these developers, we’ve heard that it can be challenging to create Dockerfiles, Helm charts, and other configuration-as-code files required to create container images and deploy them to Kubernetes. And taking your code from Visual Studio to your Kubernetes cluster requires memorizing some pretty complicated CLI commands."