A look at application development with Visual Studio Code and Kubernetes

Visual Studio Code (or VSCode) is a open source and cross platform text editor by Microsoft. The functionality of the editor can be extended by installing extensions from the marketplace. The editor has a command palette where the functionality added by extensions is accessible.

The command palette is accessible with the key combination Ctrl+Shift+P (Windows/Linux) or Cmd+Shift+P (MacOS)

In the following screen cast we take a look at the Docker, Kubernetes and Helm extensions for Visual Studio Code for use during the development life cycle of an application.

• The Docker extension makes it easy to build and deploy containerized applications from Visual Studio Code. The extension can generate the Dockerfile and docker-compose.yml files for your application. It also adds syntax highlighting support for Dockerfile and docker-compose.yaml files
• vs-kubernetes provides a Visual Studio Code extension for interacting with Kubernetes clusters. This extension makes it easy to integrate kubernetes deployments and testing in the development lifecycle of your project. A Dockerfile should be present in your workspace to be able to use this extension.
• vs-helm provides Kubernetes Helm chart developers with a set of tools for creating and testing charts.

With Visual Studio Code developers can easily build and deploy their applications to a kubernetes cluster. The developer does not have to possess a lot of experience to deploy their applications on a kubernetes cluster.