Microsoft Azure Dev Spaces, Google Jib target Kubernetes woes

To entice developers to create more apps on their environments, major cloud platform companies will meet them where they live.

Microsoft and Google both released tools to help ease app development on their respective platforms, Microsoft Azure and the Google Cloud Platform. Microsoft's Azure Dev Spaces and Google Jib help developers build applications for the Kubernetes container orchestrator and Java environments and represent a means to deliver simpler, developer-friendly technology.

Microsoft's Azure Dev Spaces, now in public preview, is a cloud-native development environment for the company's Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), where developers can work on applications while connected with the cloud and their team. These users can build cloud applications with containers and microservices on AKS and do not deal with any infrastructure management or orchestration, according to Microsoft.

As Kubernetes further commoditizes deployment and orchestration, cloud platform vendors and public cloud providers must focus on how to simplify customers' implementation of cloud-native development methods -- namely DevOps, CI/CD and microservices, said Rhett Dillingham, an analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy in Austin, Texas.

"Azure Dev Spaces has the potential to be one of Microsoft's most valuable recent developer tooling innovations, because it addresses the complexity of integration testing and debugging in microservices environments," he said.

Edwin Yuen

With the correct supporting services, developers can fully test and deploy in Microsoft Azure, added Edwin Yuen, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group in Milford, Mass.

"This would benefit the developer, as it eases the process of container development by allowing them to see the results of their app without having to set up a Docker or Kubernetes environment," he said.

Meanwhile, Google's Jib containerizer tool enables developers to package a Java application into a container image with the Java tools they already know to create container-based advanced applications. And like Azure Dev Spaces, it handles a lot of the underlying infrastructure and orchestration tasks.

It's about simplifying the experience ... the developer is eased into the process by using existing tools and eliminating the need to set up Docker or Kubernetes.

Integration with Java development tools Maven and Gradle means Java developers can skip the step to create JAR, or Java ARchive, files and then containerize them, Yuen said.

"Like Azure Dev Spaces, it's about simplifying the experience -- this time, not the laptop jump, but the jump from JAR to container," he said. "But, again, the developer is eased into the process by using existing tools and eliminating the need to set up Docker or Kubernetes."

Jib also extends Google's association with the open source community to provide Java developers an easy path to containerize their apps while using the Google Cloud Platform, Yuen added.