Kickstart Agent for AKS Automatic (Preview)

Overview

The Kickstart agent is an AI-guided onboarding experience that deploys a containerized application to AKS Automatic end-to-end, contributed as a VS Code chat agent. It is designed for users who want to ship an app to AKS without deep Kubernetes expertise — Kickstart walks through discovery, infrastructure configuration, design, artifact generation, review, and deploy as a single conversational flow.

Kickstart is a Preview feature and is gated behind a setting.

Enabling the Feature

💡 Important Note: Kickstart is disabled by default. To enable it, add the following line to your user settings.json file:

"aks.kickstartEnabledPreview": true

You can open this file by pressing Ctrl+Shift+P (or Cmd+Shift+P on macOS), selecting Preferences: Open Settings (JSON), and adding the setting within the top-level JSON object. Reload the window after changing the setting.

The same flag also gates:

  • The kickstart and kickstart-reviewer chat agents (contributed via contributes.chatAgents).
  • The 19 kickstart phase and domain skills used by the agent (contributed via contributes.chatSkills).
  • The two Kickstart commands listed below.

Features

Launch the Kickstart Agent

Starts the guided AKS Automatic onboarding flow. Available from the Command Palette or by selecting kickstart in the Copilot chat agent picker.

Command: AKS: Launch Kickstart Agent (aks.kickstart.launchExperience)

The agent walks through seven sequential phases:

  1. Discover — understand the app (language, dependencies, ports, environment variables) and map each service.
  2. Configure Infrastructure — create new or select existing Azure resources (resource group, AKS Automatic cluster, ACR).
  3. Design — propose the target architecture and confirm with the user.
  4. Generate — create Dockerfile(s), Kubernetes manifests, Bicep, and a GitHub Actions workflow.
  5. Review — hand off to the internal kickstart-reviewer agent to validate every artifact against a security + AKS Automatic compliance checklist.
  6. Pre-Deploy Check — verify the cluster is ready and ACR is attached.
  7. Deploy — build, push, apply, and health-check the running app.

Configure a Kickstart Cluster

Provisions or updates an AKS Automatic cluster suitable for Kickstart deploys, without going through the full agent flow.

Command: AKS: Configure Kickstart Cluster (aks.kickstartCluster)

  • The Kickstart agent and its skills live under agents/ and skills/ in this repository.
  • Kickstart hands generated artifacts off to kickstart-reviewer for validation before deploy — this handoff is internal and not user-invocable.