// the find
Azure/draft-classic
A tool for developers to create cloud-native applications on Kubernetes.
Draft is a Kubernetes inner-loop dev tool from Azure that scaffolds Dockerfiles and Helm charts for your app and handles build/deploy with a single command. It targets the gap between 'I have code' and 'I have a running pod' without requiring you to know much about Kubernetes. Last commit was June 2024 and the README explicitly calls it experimental with no stable release.
Language detection for scaffolding is genuinely useful — it covers Go, Python, Ruby, Node, Java, Rust, C#, and a few others out of the box, saving real time on the Dockerfile/Helm boilerplate. The local Minikube path skips the image push entirely, which makes the iteration loop fast. The plugin system is a reasonable extension point if you need custom pack behavior. The Helm chart templates it generates are production-shaped (ingress, service, deployment) rather than toy examples.
It uses Gopkg (dep) for dependency management, which was deprecated in 2020 — the toolchain itself is fossilized. The project never hit a stable release and has been effectively dead since 2024, with Microsoft having moved on to the Azure Developer CLI (azd) as its spiritual successor. The pack detection is heuristic and brittle: a Go repo with an HTML file gets misclassified, as the testdata shows. There's no support for multi-service or monorepo layouts, which is where most real Kubernetes complexity lives.