Troubleshoot Clusters From Visual Studio Code With Weave Scope
If you’re using Visual Studio, now you can visualize and troubleshoot deployments and workloads with the Weave Scope Kubernetes Tools extension from your IDE. This gives you a single workflow without having to context-switch between applications.
We are very excited to announce that Weave Scope is now apart of Visual Studio Code Kubernetes Tool extensions. Weave Scope is a great way to visualize what’s happening inside your cluster. Both our customers and open source community members use it to ensure that their deployments rolled out as expected and to troubleshoot them by drilling down on workloads if there is a problem. If you’re using Visual Studio, now you can visualize and troubleshoot deployments and workloads with the Weave Scope extension from within your IDE. This gives you a single workflow without context-switching between applications.
What are Visual Studio Code Kubernetes Tools?
Visual Studio Code Kubernetes Tools are a set of extensions that help developers build apps for Kubernetes and help DevOps teams troubleshoot applications running on Kubernetes. The extensions work across a wide variety of Kubernetes installations: Azure, Minikube, AWS, GCP and more).
Features include:
- Ability to view your clusters in an explorer tree view, and drill into workloads, services, pods and nodes.
- Browsing Helm repos and installing charts into your Kubernetes cluster.
- Intellisense for Kubernetes resources and Helm charts and templates.
- Editing Kubernetes resource manifests and apply them to your cluster.
- Building and running containers in your cluster from Dockerfiles in your project.
- Viewing diffs of a resource's current state against the resource manifest in your Git repo
- Easily checking out the Git commit corresponding to a deployed application.
- Running commands or starting a shell within your application's pods.
- Getting or following logs and events from your clusters.
- Forwarding local ports to your application's pods.
- Creating Helm charts using scaffolding and snippets.
- Bootstrapping applications using Draft and rapidly deploying and debugging them to speed up the development loop.
The first feature on that list is a natural match for Weave Scope. It was only a matter of time until somebody put together a Weave Scope extension on top of this. Ralph Squillace (@ralph_squillace) Principal PM open-source dev UX on Microsoft’s Azure Cloud Native team, kicked off the effort and it’s looking great!
Install the Weave Scope extension
Just follow these simple steps:
#1. Install VS Code.
#2. Click the extension icon from the toolbar within VS Code.
#3. Search for the Kubernetes extension and install it.
#4. Search for the kube-scope-weave extension and install it as well.
The Kubernetes extension will use the active kubeconfig, so you should be all set. If you’re starting from scratch, you should probably install something like minikube too. The extension can also talk natively to Azure..
Ensure that you install Helm as well.
How to use the Weave Scope extension
Either start a Kubernetes cluster using the extension and e.g. minikube or use an existing cluster. Once spun up, you’ll see nodes, pods and all other Kubernetes objects in the extension’s menu tree.
Press CTRL + Shift + p to enter the command menu and type the first few letters until you find “Scope: Install Weave Scope”. This will take a bit of time and will notify you when it’s deployed.
Now you can easily navigate the Kubernetes object tree in VS Code. Right-click on “Open Weave Scope” to open a web browser with the Weave Scope App in your cluster. How cool is that?
And a new Scope release to go with it
Filip Barl also just released the 1.11.0 release of Weave Scope. Many of the changes which landed in this release were discussed in the blog post we wrote together with MayaData. One of them is having the information of “kubectl describe” just a mouse-click away:
The second was support of Kubernetes Jobs. Thanks a lot Akash and Satyam from MayaData for this.
Apart from that a whole host of performance improvements and component upgrades were included in this release. Read the full release notes of Weave Scope 1.11.0 over at Github.
Thanks everyone! We love getting Weave Scope out to people, so thanks to Ralph Squillace for this extension, Microsoft and their communities for putting the Kubernetes extensions and VS Code itself together and thanks for the great work you all put into Weave Scope! If you like Weave Scope and want to start contributing, check out its Github and join us on Slack, the mailing list and/or community meetings on Zoom. We’re looking forward to seeing you there.
Need help?
For the past 4 years, Weaveworks has been running Kubernetes at scale. We’re happy to share our knowledge and help teams embrace the benefits of on-premise installations of upstream Kubernetes with Weaveworks Kubernetes Platform. Contact us for more details on our Kubernetes support packages.
