Three new open source tools from IBM will make it faster and easier for developers to build and deploy applications for Kubernetes, an increasingly important skillset as companies seek to modernize infrastructures and adopt hybrid cloud strategies, the company announced Tuesday at OSCON 2019.

The projects—Kabanero, Appsody, and Codewind—aim to lower the barrier for entry for developers to use Kubernetes, according to a blog post from Nate Ziemann, senior product manager for IBM Cloud Developer Technologies.

SEE: How to build a successful developer career (free PDF) (TechRepublic)

Kabanero aims to help developers, architects, and operations to work together in a single solution, so architects and operations can include their organization’s standards for things like security, and build pipelines in a customized stack for developers to use. It brings together open source projects Knative, Istio, and Tekton with new open projects Codewind, Appsody, and Razee in an end-to-end solution to help build, deploy, and manage Kubernetes-based applications, the post said.

“Kabanero takes the guess work out of Kubernetes and DevOps,” Ziemann wrote in the post. “With Kabanero, you don’t need to spend time mastering DevOps practices and Kubernetes infrastructure topics like networking, ingress, and security. Instead, Kabanero integrates the runtimes and frameworks that you already know and use (Node.js, Java, Swift) with a Kubernetes-native DevOps toolchain…So, developers can spend more time developing scalable applications and less time understanding infrastructure.”

Meanwhile, Appsody is an open source project that simplifies the creation of cloud-native applications in containers, allowing developers to create a microservice that meets their organization’s standards and requirements in just minutes, according to the post. Appsody offers pre-configured stacks and templates for popular open source runtimes and frameworks, to act as a foundation to build applications for Kubernetes and Knative deployments on.

“This allows developers to focus on their code, reducing the learning curve for cloud-native development and enabling rapid development for these cloud-native applications,” Ziemann wrote in the post.

Codewind is another new open source project that provides extensions to integrated development environments (IDEs) like VS Code, Eclipse, and Eclipse Che, so developers can use the workflow and IDE they are familiar with to build applications in containers.

“Essentially, Codewind enables you to develop in containers without knowing you are developing in containers,” Ziemann wrote in the post.

Developers can check out each open source project’s GitHub repo in the post.

To learn more, check out How to become a developer: A cheat sheet on TechRepublic.

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