News

Azure Toolkit for IntelliJ Now Supports Kubernetes

• By David Ramel
• August 19, 2022

Microsoft's Java team has introduced new support in the Java on Azure Tooling package for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) in the IntelliJ toolkit, along with new support of Azure virtual machines (VMs).

Azure Toolkits for Java is an open-source project that helps Java developers easily create, develop, configure, test, and deploy highly available and scalable Java web apps to Azure from Eclipse and the IntelliJ IDEA integrated development environment (IDE) on all supported platforms.

Microsoft's Java on Azure Tooling dev team manages the Azure Toolkits for Java repo on GitHub, which includes tooling for the Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA IDEs.

"Azure Kubernetes Service simplifies the deployment of a managed Kubernetes cluster in Azure by offloading the operational overhead to Azure," Jialuo Gan said in a blog post. "We have been consistently hearing from our customers that they want better AKS integration to view pod logs, manage clusters and workloads… In our latest release, AKS cluster is available on Azure Toolkit for IntelliJ so that developers can manage Azure Kubernetes Service directly in Azure Explorer."

The new VM support lets developers directly run or debug applications on an Azure VM in IntelliJ IDEA. Noting that it can be complex for developers to launch an Azure VM within the JetBrains IDE and then connect to it, the team an "Azure VM" item to the "Run On" targets list of run/debug configurations of IntelliJ IDEA.

"Azure VMs is one of several types of on-demand, scalable computing resources that Azure offers," Gan said. "We know that running or debugging applications in another environment such as Azure Virtual Machine will be essential for Java developers, who want to build applications in the cloud or create environments for development and testing."

The dev team also made it easier to search Azure account subscriptions, which will be especially helpful for teams or organizations that have many Azure subscriptions while also helping developers find official documents and blogs more easily by adding more entries to the settings menu in Azure Explorer.

"With this feature, you can not only open the Azure SDK Reference Book to find more support, but also easily contact us by reporting issues or requesting features, as well as providing feedback. Besides, the Dev Blogs and Documentation also bring more useful resources," Gan said.

IntelliJ IDEA has been getting much more attention than its Eclipse counterpart lately, as the team in June announced an update to Java on Azure tooling highlighted by a new application-centric view for the Azure Toolkit for IntelliJ that's designed to make the IDE's interface more user friendly. And in last month's update, the team introduced a new "getting started" experience for the IDE.

All of the above comes as Microsoft is in the middle of a big push to tout Java for Azure development. The company recently claimed, "We use more Java than one can imagine."