Microsoft recently introduced the Arc Visual Studio Code Extension in public review. This extension improves the developer experience for both workloads that are running on the Edge and services that are built to be published on the Azure Marketplace.
The company understands that learning new technologies and developing or testing the applications can consume much time. To simplify this experience, they brought these resources to Visual Studio Code, so it is not necessary anymore to leave the workbench. Thanks to the Azure Arc VS Code Extension, a developer can deploy an Arc-enabled environment, learn Arc technologies using sample applications, as well as deploy to an AKS cluster for testing.
Joachim Gomard, a senior advanced migration GBB specialist at Microsoft, introduced the extension:
Whether you’re just starting your journey with Arc, or you’re already in production with an Arc-enabled application, our extension can help streamline your developer experience. The Arc VS Code extension is a home for Enterprise and ISV developers alike.
To deploy and install an Arc-enabled environment, some prerequisites from single node deployment for Edge Essentials must be met. Additionally, there are the following conditions: no VPN connection, static wifi configuration during the installation and no existing eFlow or other Kubernetes setup on the system.
After the AKS Edge Essentials cluster installation, the cluster should appear in the Native K8s Cluster view, where it is possible to connect to Arc. Moreover, it is required to add the connectedk8s extension and register three namespaces.
az extension add --name connectedk8s
az provider register --namespace Microsoft.Kubernetes
az provider register --namespace Microsoft.KubernetesConfiguration
az provider register --namespace Microsoft.ExtendedLocation
This environment is intended to be used for development and testing purposes only. Users can use this environment for 30 days for free once they connect to Arc.
The example applications are available in the Jumpstart Agora repository. This repository contains a collection of applications for various cloud-to-edge scenarios.
The information about what the extension offers is available in the Walkthrough. To access it, it is necessary to open the command palette using the ‘F1’ key. The next step is to type in the “Welcome: Open Walkthrough” command, and then click on it to select the “Get Started with Azure Arc in VS Code” Walkthroughs from the list.
Command palette in VS Code (Source: Microsoft blog)
Apart from the mentioned earlier hardware requirements, some features in this extension require also AZ and AZD CLI, as well as an Azure account and subscription.