Containerization Assist Skills for Copilot Chat (Preview)

Overview

The Containerization Assist (CA) skills are five agent skills that expose containerization capabilities directly inside GitHub Copilot chat, so users can containerize a workload and deploy it to AKS through a chat-first workflow. The skills are packaged from the containerization-assist-mcp npm dependency and shipped inside this extension — no separate MCP server, tool install, or extension is required.

Contributed skills (via contributes.chatSkills):

  • analyze-repo — inspect the workspace and infer language, framework, and containerization needs.
  • generate-dockerfile — produce a Dockerfile grounded in analyze-repo output and CA’s Dockerfile knowledge base.
  • fix-dockerfile — validate an existing Dockerfile and apply fixes against CA’s policy set.
  • generate-k8s-manifests — produce Kubernetes manifests (deployment, service, configmap) with production-safe defaults.
  • deploy-to-aks — orchestrate the full analyze → generate → build → push → apply → verify loop against an AKS cluster.

The skills are a Preview feature and are available by default when the AKS extension is installed.

Motivation

CA already ships as a standalone MCP server that any editor can consume. Contributing the same skills through the AKS extension delivers three things that the standalone MCP server alone does not:

  1. Zero setup for AKS users. CA’s containerization knowledge — Dockerfile generation, policy-driven fixes, K8s manifest generation, and the AKS deploy loop — becomes available the moment the AKS extension is installed. Users do not need to install a second extension, register an MCP server, or manage a separate process.
  2. Chat-first workflow. The existing Container Assist features in this extension (enabled via aks.containerAssistEnabledPreview) are command- and panel-driven. The CA skills complement those by exposing the same underlying capabilities inside Copilot chat as agentic slash-command flows — better suited to iterative, conversational work.
  3. A single AKS surface for containerization + deploy. Combined with the Kickstart agent, the AKS extension can now guide a user from an uncontainerized workspace to a running deployment on AKS entirely from chat, using one consistent set of AKS-specific defaults.

Availability

The five CA skills are included and registered automatically. No feature flag or additional setup is required. The aks.containerAssistEnabledPreview setting controls the separate command-based Container Assist flows, while aks.kickstartEnabledPreview controls the Kickstart agent and its supporting skills.

How the Skills Are Packaged

At build time, webpack.config.js copies node_modules/containerization-assist-mcp/skills/ into dist/skills/. Each of the five entries in contributes.chatSkills points at ./dist/skills/<name>/SKILL.md, so the packaged extension ships the skill definitions directly and stays in sync with the CA version pinned in package.json.