Introducing Draft: Simplifying Kubernetes Container Development

--- title: " Draft: Kubernetes container development made easy " date: 2017-05-31 slug: draft-kubernetes-container-development url: /blog/2017/05/Draft-Kubernetes-Container-Development author: > Brendan Burns (Microsoft Azure) --- About a month ago Microsoft announced the acquisition of Deis to expand our expertise in containers and Kubernetes. Today, I’m excited to announce a new open source project derived from this newly expanded Azure team: Draft. While by now the strengths of Kubernetes for deploying and managing applications at scale are well understood. The process of developing a new application for Kubernetes is still too hard. It’s harder still if you are new to containers, Kubernetes, or developing cloud applications. Draft fills this role. As its name implies it is a tool that helps you begin that first draft of a containerized application running in Kubernetes. When you first run the draft tool, it automatically discovers the code that you are working on and builds out the scaffolding to support containerizing your application. Using heuristics and a variety of pre-defined project templates draft will create an initial Dockerfile to containerize your application, as well as a Helm Chart to enable your application to be deployed and maintained in a Kubernetes cluster. Teams can even bring their own draft project templates to customize the scaffolding that is built by the tool. But the value of draft extends beyond simply scaffolding in some files to help you create your application. Draft also deploys a server into your existing Kubernetes cluster that is automatically kept in sync with the code on your laptop. Whenever you make changes to your application, the draft daemon on your laptop synchronizes that code with the draft server in Kubernetes and a new container is built and deployed automatically without any user action required. Draft enables the “inner loop” development experience for the cloud. Of course, as is the expectation with all infrastructure software today, Draft is available as an open source project, and it itself is in “draft” form :) We eagerly invite the community to come and play around with draft today, we think it’s pretty awesome, even in this early form. But we’re especially excited to see how we can develop a community around draft to make it even more powerful for all developers of containerized applications on Kubernetes. To give you a sense for what Draft can do, here is an example drawn from the [Getting Started](https://github.com/Azure/draft/blob/master/docs/getting-started.md) page in the [GitHub repository](https://github.com/Azure/draft). There are multiple example applications included within the [examples directory](https://github.com/Azure/draft/blob/master/examples). For this walkthrough, we'll be using the [python example application](https://github.com/Azure/draft/tree/master/examples/example-python) which uses [Flask](http://flask.pocoo.org/) to provide a very simple Hello World webserver. ``` $ cd examples/python ``` **Draft Create** We need some "scaffolding" to deploy our app into a [Kubernetes](https://kubernetes.io/) cluster. Draft can create a [Helm](https://github.com/kubernetes/helm) chart, a Dockerfile and a draft.toml with draft create: ``` $ draft create --\> Python app detected --\> Ready to sail $ ls Dockerfile app.py chart/ draft.toml requirements.txt ``` The chart/ and Dockerfile assets created by Draft default to a basic Python configuration. This Dockerfile harnesses the [python:onbuild image](https://hub.docker.com/_/python/), which will install the dependencies in requirements.txt and copy the current directory into /usr/src/app. And to align with the service values in chart/values.yaml, this Dockerfile exposes port 80 from the container. The draft.toml file contains basic configuration about the application like the name, which namespace it will be deployed to, and whether to deploy the app automatically when local files change.

Microsoft introduces Draft, an open-source tool aimed at simplifying Kubernetes application development. Draft automatically generates the necessary scaffolding (Dockerfile, Helm Chart) for containerizing applications and deploys a server in the Kubernetes cluster that stays synchronized with local code changes. This enables developers to focus on the 'inner loop' of development, with automatic container building and deployment upon code changes. Draft is in its early stages and encourages community involvement for further development.