Google Cloud Code gives Kubernetes development a boost

Google has introduced Google Cloud Code, a set of plug-ins for the JetBrains IntelliJ Idea IDE and the Microsoft Visual Studio Code editor that assists with the development of cloud-native applications. The first release of Cloud Code is intended to make it easier to build applications that run on the Kubernetes container orchestration platform, including Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).

Google Cloud Code is in a beta release stage for Visual Studio Code and in an alpha stage for IntelliJ. Designed to accelerate the development lifecycle, Cloud Code comes with command-line container tools including Skaffold, Jib, and Kubectl, with developers able to get continuous feedback on a project during the build process.

Cloud Code extends the local edit-compile-debug loop to a local or remote Kubernetes environment. Cloud Code leverages the “infrastructure as code” concept, with environment configurations managed as source code in a repo, enabling reproducible environments and quicker location of errors.

 Other features include:

• Support for local deployment profiles, for defining deployment targets such as local development, shared development, test or production. This enables testing and debugging from the developer workstation or in the cloud.
• Google APIs can be integrated into applications.
• Integration with existing develops tools and services including Google’s Cloud Build and Stackdriver. When code is ready for deployment, developers can perform a pull request or commit, triggering Cloud Build to build, test, and deploy an application. Pairing Cloud Code with Cloud Build is intended to make it easier to edit and test changes to a Kubernetes config.
• Templates, linting, and error highlighting are provided for Kubernetes yaml files.
• Application logs can be viewed from any environment directly within the IDE.

You can try out Cloud Code for VS Code or for IntelliJ from the Google Cloud Platform.