Kubernetes is as much of a north star as anything for Google’s cloud computing efforts, and it thinks software developers need more help getting their applications deployed on the popular container-orchestration platform.
Google unveiled Cloud Code, a set of plug-ins for popular integrated development environments (IDEs) Visual Studio Code and IntelliJ, Wednesday during the second day of Google Cloud Next 2019. There are lots of services that help developers check their code for errors as they write — a developer-oriented version of that little red spellcheck line — but Cloud Code is designed specifically to catch problems with code that is intended for cloud-native environments.
Kubernetes helps companies manage large numbers of containerized applications, and it was originally developed inside Google as a minimized version of the internal system Google uses to manage its own infrastructure. It is a complex beast and relatively new to a lot of software developers, forcing developers to learn new ways to write applications that will run reliably on cloud services.
“Cloud code gives a power boost to your IDE,” said Pali Bhat, vice president of product management in Google, in a briefing at Google Cloud Next. IDEs were designed to work with local code, and Google thinks Cloud Code will allow developers to catch errors much earlier in the development cycle when they are easier to fix, he said.
Visual Studio Code is the open-source version of Microsoft’s Visual Studio IDE, and it was the most popular development environment in Stack Overflow’s annual developer survey. IntelliJ is also an open-source IDE used primarily by Java developers, and it ranked as the fourth-most popular IDE in the 2019 version of the survey released earlier this week.
