Kubernetes and VSCode

The VSCode IDE relies majorly on plugins to extend its features and utilize its capabilities. The VSCode marketplace houses thousands of plugins and extensions developed by Microsft and other third parties to make your development using the VSCode IDE easier. The article highlights such plugins and extensions built to simplify your Kubernetes development on VSCode.

YAML

Developed by OpenShift, YAML is a VSCode plugin that provides full YAML support in VSCode via the yaml-language-server. It offers various features such as YAML validation, error detection, document outlining, auto-completion, and formatting. It also has in-built support for Kubernetes syntax to allow you efficiently operate your Kubernetes YAML definitions.

Kubernetes

The official Kubernetes plugin from Microsft is one of the most important extensions for a seamless Kubernetes development using VSCode. It enables you to build and run Kubernetes applications on any infrastructure or cloud platform. It offers basic and advanced features that allow you to view your clusters down to the pods and nodes level, browse and install Helm charts into your clusters, view Kubernetes resources states, edit resource manifests, and apply them to your Kubernetes clusters. It also allows you to forward local ports to application pods, collect logs and events from clusters, and create Helm charts using templates and snippets.

Cloud Code

Cloud Code is a VSCode plugin developed by Google Cloud to support Kubernetes and Cloud Run application development in VSCode. It provides configuration snippets and templates to help you kickstart your Kubernetes development and a built-in secrets manager to help create, view, manage, and secure your Kubernetes secrets. It also allows you to operate your Kubernetes clusters and debug your applications without needing to set up a debugger,

Bridge to Kubernetes

Bridge to Kubernetes is another plugin from Microsoft that fosters rapid and seamless Kubernetes development by allowing you to remotely run, modify, and debug your Kubernetes application without causing any break in service. It will enable you to alter your production microservices by deploying the microservice on your development machine and modify it while maintaining a concurrent connection with other microservices in the cluster.

Azure Kubernetes Service

Still in its preview phase, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is a VSCode extension that enables you to view and manage Kubernetes clusters on the Azure cloud platform. It allows you to view and diagnose Azure Kubernetes clusters, add, merge, and save kubeconfig. It also allows you to browse and configure CI/CD pipelines for your AKS Kubernetes clusters.

Kubernetes Support

Kubernetes Support is a plugin that adds code snippets and templates into your VSCode IDE. Instead of writing standard codes like creating a secret or defining a deployment from scratch, you can use snippets provided by Kubernetes Support for faster and efficient development.

OpenShift Connector

With OpenShift Connector, developers can create, deploy, and debug applications running on Kubernetes or OpenShift in a simplified development environment. IT helps you work with local or remote OpenShift instances to build, deploy, and manage your applications across cloud and on-premise infrastructure.

Helm Intellisense

This Helm intellisense extension provides templates and intelligent code completion to assist with writing quality Helm templates. Helm Intellisense is compatible with Windows and Linux platforms and also supports auto-completion for YAML.

Kubernetes Kind

Kind (Kubernetes in Docker) is an open-source CNCF certified Kubernetes installer that supports highly available multi-node clusters and builds Kubernetes release builds from its source. The Kubernetes Kind extension visualizes your Kind Kubernetes cluster in VSCodes Kubernetes explorer to help you create, delete, and merge clusters into your kubeconfig.

Kubernetes Templates

This extension provides Kubernetes templates to help quickly generate YAML files for defining Kubernetes resources. It also offers automatic code completions when creating Kubernetes resource objects.

Knative

Knative is an open-source tool by Red Hat that allows you to efficiently run serverless containers and manage event subscription, delivery, and handling on Kubernetes clusters. The Knative VSCode extension will enable you to use the Knative tool from your VSCode development environment easily.

Checkov

Checkov by Bridgecrew is a static code analysis tool that allows you to Find and fix misconfigurations in infrastructure-as-code manifests like Terraform, Kubernetes, Cloudformation, Serverless framework in real-time from your VSCode environment.

Kubernetes k3d

K3d is a platform-agnostic, lightweight wrapper that runs K3s in a docker container. Like Kubernetes Kind, this extension visualizes the k3d Kubernetes implementation in VSCode’s Kubernetes extension cloud explorer to create and delete k3d clusters, add and remove nodes and replace existing k3d clusters from the VSCode interface.

Lazy k8s

The Lazy k8s extension allows you to run Apply, Delete, Describe and Get operations on your Kubernetes YAML resource definitions from your VSCode interface with the click of a button.

Kubernetes Dashboard

This plugin provides an intuitive UI to create Kind clusters, Install Helm Chart, Forward ports, and manage Kubernetes clusters from your Kubernetes cluster.

istio-snippets

This extension provides code snippets for operating istio service mesh directly from VSCode interface.

VSCode Linkerd

VSCode Linkerd

is a Linkerd Service Mesh explorer for VSCodethat is built to work with the official VSCode Kubernetes extension.