Google gives a boost to the development of Kubernetes

Google  today launched a set of plugins for popular development environments like IntelliJ and Visual Studio Code that promise to make building cloud-native applications significantly easier. You can’t say “cloud-native” without saying Kubernetes, so it’s no surprise that the focus here is on helping developers build, debug and deploy their code to a Kubernetes  cluster right from their IDE.

Typically, Google argues, developers edit, compile and debug their code locally. That’s often just fine, but it can also create issues when the production environment doesn’t quite match the local one. But building containers comes with its own challenges — and nobody really enjoys writing YAML files by hand just to test code. Indeed, the promise here is that the developer doesn’t have to write a single line of YAML.

The promise then, is that you can continue to develop your code just like you used to, while Cloud Code handles all of the work of turning it into a cloud-native application. The tools are also integrated with Google’s DevOps tools like Cloud Build and Stackdriver.

With Cloud Code, Google intends to make life easier for developers working on Kubernetes. Early versions of plug-ins for Visual Studio Code and IntelliJ promise to accelerate the build, roll-out, and debug cycle of native cloud applications.

Google unveils Cloud Code, a set of plug-ins for the IntelliJ Idea IDE from JetBrains and Microsoft Visual Studio Code, which helps with the development of distributed applications. The first version of Cloud Code is intended to facilitate the creation of applications designed to run on the

Kubernetes container orchestration platform, including Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).

Google Cloud Code is in beta phase for Visual Studio Code and in alpha phase for IntelliJ. Designed to accelerate the development cycle, the product comes with container tools running on command lines such as Skaffold, Jib and Kubectl. Developers will be able to get continuous feedback on projects during the design process.

Google APIs can be integrated

Google’s tool extends the local edit-compile-debug loop to a local or remote Kubernetes environment. It is based on the infrastructure as code (IaC) concept, with configurations managed as source code in a repository folder, allowing reproducible environments and faster error location.

Cloud Code includes several other features:

– Support for local deployment profiles, to define objectives such as local development, shared development, testing or production. This allows testing and debugging directly from the developer workstation or in the cloud.

– Google API integration in apps

– Integration with existing tools and services, including Google Cloud Build and Stackdriver. When the code is ready for deployment, developers can execute a pull request or commit, triggering the Cloud Build to build, test, and deploy an application. The combination of Cloud Code and Cloud Build makes it easy to edit and test changes to a Kubernetes configuration

– Templates, linting (detection of formal errors in code) and highlighting errors are provided for yaml files of Kubernetes

– Ability to view application logs from any environment directly in the IDE.

Cloud Code combines a number of existing open-source tools, including Kubectl, the command-line tools for working with the Kubernetes API; Jib, for building containers for Java applications; and Skaffold, for setting up the continuous deploying pipeline for Kubernetes applications.

The service will work for virtually all popular programming languages, including Microsoft’s .NET Core.

“This essentially gives you turbocharged, cloud-native app development, right in your IDE,” Google Cloud VP of product and design Pali Bhat told me. “It brings remote app development right into your developer loop right in the IDE. This unlocks the power of all of these developers and lets them build for Kubernetes, build for cloud-native, without having to worry about all of the different pieces that they had to learn.”