AZK

AZK is an open-source command-line tool designed to simplify the creation and management of development environments by leveraging containerization and virtualization technologies. It provides a way for developers to define, provision, and run isolated environments that reflect the project’s dependencies and services. By capturing the environment in a manifest or configuration file, AZK helps teams reproduce identical setups across different machines and platforms.

AZK typically integrates with container platforms such as Docker and, in some configurations, virtualization backends like Vagrant. Its workflow centers on describing services, dependencies, and runtime parameters—such as ports, volumes, and environment variables—in a declarative file. The tool then orchestrates containers and related resources, enabling developers to start, stop, or access a shell within the environment with a few commands. Modular design allows extensions or plugins to manage additional tooling, databases, and caches, while services can be composed into multi-container stacks.

Communities around AZK have used it to standardize local development, facilitate onboarding, and bridge the gap between development and production environments. Documentation typically covers installation, project setup, manifest syntax, and common patterns for sharing environments within a team. As with many open-source projects, the availability and activity of the AZK project may vary over time; current status is best checked on the project’s repository and official site.

See also Docker, Vagrant, containerization, and development environment tooling.