GitOps Deployments from VS Code with little to no Kubernetes Knowledge

[weaveworks]

Kubernetes has become the de facto standard for container orchestration. More and more companies are seeing the benefits of moving to cloud-native - speed, agility, scalability, and improved productivity - and are adopting Kubernetes. Despite its growing popularity and all the advantages it brings, Kubernetes is quite complex.

A recent study found that 4 in 5 people (running Kubernetes in production) admit that Kubernetes is more complex than other technologies they use. In the era of “You build it, you run it,” this often translates into a steep learning curve, especially for application developers. They now have to tinker with Kubernetes infrastructure, write YAML files, and learn more tools than ever before to deploy code to production. This brings us to our next question: How can we make things, specifically deployments, easier for developers?

The latest Visual Studio Code Live stream episode discusses how a VS Code extension can abstract and simplify deployments for application developers. With this extension, application developers can deploy directly from the IDE interface in a Kubernetes environment - with policies and canary deployments - without needing to be an expert.

This talk was hosted by Burke Holland (@burkeholland) and brought several people from the Weaveworks Developer Experience Team:

• Tamao Nakahara (@mewzherder)
• Kingdon Barrett (@yebyen)
• Juozas Gaigalas (@juozasg)
  

In this session, Kingdon, Tamao, and Juozas will demo an easy way to deploy GitOps from VS Code and show your platform team how to set it up so you can get back to innovating and improving your apps.

GitOps Tools for Visual Studio Code

Weaveworks GitOps Tool Extension for Visual Studio Code provides a simple way to manage and operate a Kubernetes environment following the GitOps framework. From the creators of GitOps and Flux, this extension was created to help application developers deploy code directly from VS Code without needing to be an expert on Kubernetes, GitOps, policies, and canary deployments.

Developers can use this extension to visualize, configure, and debug Flux objects used for GitOps workflows. Some of its other features include:

• Select clusters and examine installed GitOps Toolkit components
• Enable and Disable GitOps (install/uninstall Flux) on clusters
• Create, view, and edit sources (git, OCI, Helm, and Bucket), and workloads (Kustomization and HelmRelease)
  

The VS Code extension for GitOps increases the control and visibility of development teams without needing to leave their code and IDE. This in turn, minimizes context switching and reduces the cognitive load from using multiple interfaces, enabling developers to build, troubleshoot, and ship features faster to their users.

Check the Visual Studio Marketplace for the complete list of features and installation instructions.

Key Moments

We’ve marked some of the key moments in the talk and they include:

• 00:42 Welcome to the VS Code Livestream
• 04:43 Weaveworks Intro
• 05:57 No Kubernetes expertise required with Tamao Nakahara
• 10:52 How to deploy directly from VS Code with the GitOps extension
• 15:30 How it works with Kingdon Barrett and Juozas Gaigalas
• 19:18 GitOps App demo
• 30:58 GitOps Template demo
• 46:19 Q&A
• 50:54 Lightning Round
• 57:22 Wrap

Watch the talk in its entirety:

Boost Developer Productivity with Weave GitOps

Weave GitOps, a state-of-the-art GitOps solution, is powered by Flux, Flagger, and other leading open-source tools available today. Weave GitOps enables developers to easily deploy and manage Kubernetes clusters and applications using GitOps, at scale in any environment.

Request a demo today to learn more.

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