Microsoft Corp. wants to help developers get started with Kubernetes, the popular open-source container orchestration tool originally created by Google Inc. To that end, the company has just launched a new tool called Draft that’s designed to streamline the setting up of container-based applications.

The idea behind Draft is that it allows developers to work on their apps with no knowledge of how Docker and Kubernetes work. Indeed, they can get started on building their apps even without having those tools installed on their infrastructure.

Draft is the result of Microsoft’s acquisition of Deis Inc. in April. Deis was a company “at the center of container transformation,” Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of the cloud and enterprise group at Microsoft, said at the time of the acquisition. The company built a platform to make it easier for developers to use containers, and also launched several open-source tools, including Workflow, Helm and Steward, before being acquired. Not surprisingly, Draft builds upon many of these tools.

“Draft targets the ‘inner loop’ of a developer’s workflow — while developers write code, but before they commit changes to version control,” Microsoft’s Gabe Monroy, lead project manager for containers on Microsoft Azure, said in an announcement.

With Draft, developers can use a single command to create something called a “Draft Pack.” Draft automatically detects the programming language the application code was written in, before building the draft pack by writing the detection script, Docker file and Kubernetes Helm chart into the source tree. That should make it fairly simple for developers to integrate their code into existing continuous integration pipelines, Monroy said.

A second command allows developers to begin working on their applications locally, before shipping the code to a Kubernetes development cluster of their choice. Local changes are made available to the cluster immediately, which “allows developers to edit code locally, but have their development environment running in the cloud,” from where they can access all of the application’s production dependencies, Monroy wrote.

With Kubernetes slowly but surely becoming the container orchestration platform of choice for developers, numerous companies are working to make its tools easier to use. Last week at the developer conference GlueCon, for example, a startup called Heptio released a new tool, Ksonnet, that makes it easier to reuse software code libraries on Kubernetes.

Draft seems to fill a nice niche for Microsoft, as most developers still like to write code on their laptops. But those machines aren’t powerful enough to model all the dependencies on external resources that are part and parcel of cloud-native apps. Draft solves this problem by allow developers to keep on working in their safe space while enabling access to cloud resources when required.

Draft is available to download via GitHub now.

image: Microsoft