Container based applications are gaining in popularity. And now, Microsoft has announced Draft, a new tool that will help developers in creating applications deploying the Kubernetes clusters. The system is open source and as such, is readily available for everyone. And interestingly enough, you don’t need to have particular knowledge of either Kubernetes, or draft for that matter, to get your systems up and running.
Okay, so a few months ago or so, Microsoft acquired the Deis container platform from Engine Yard. And it is now building upon that to exhibit how it is deploying its gains from the acquisition. Deis is all about making containers easier to use for developers and earlier, it had launched a slew of open-source tools like Workflow, Helm and Steward. So now, Microsoft is using some of the same experience in bringing out another, brand new open source tool.
Draft targets the ‘inner loop’ of a developer’s workflow — while developers write code, but before they commit changes to version control.
The system is seriously easy to deploy. For instance, you can use a simple “draft create” command to create a brand new draft pack. The system also automatically latches on to whatever language you are using be it Python, Node.js, Java, Ruby, PHP and Go, and then creates a pack using a detection script. It also creates a Docker file and Kubernetes Helm chart, which is directly built into the source tree.
Developers can then start working on their code anywhere they want, and it will then be despatched to any Kubernetes cluster they want. The cluster can be located locally or remotely but with draft, that does not matter.
This allows developers to edit code locally, but have their dev environment running in the cloud where they can access all their app’s production dependencies.
