chmod +x singularity.sh

Skaffold is a Kool K8s Tool!

cyberpunk

I recently found out about Skaffold, a command-line tool recently released by Google, and designed to make local Kubernetes development very easy, allowing for iterative local development against a Kubernetes cluster. It's really cool, check this out:

  • It runs as a binary in your local machine (e.g., easy install with brew, etc.).
  • It uses yaml configuration to describe how your application should be built: you specify the Docker images for your service(s) and Skaffold will tag them and push them to any valid Docker image repository.
apiVersion: skaffold/v1beta9
kind: Config
build:
  artifacts:
  - image: gcr.io/k8s-skaffold/skaffold-example
deploy:
  kubectl:
    manifests:
      - k8s-*
  • These images are ingested into your Kubernetes manifest and used to deploy changes to the clusters for every code change.
  • Skaffold watches your local development directory for filesystem changes and automatically builds and deploy your application to any local or remote Kubernetes cluster.
  • It is integrated to kubectl and GCP.
  • Skaffold not only works on your laptop as a dev tool, it also lets you reuse the same skaffold.yaml file to do deployments to your clusters in your continuous deployment system.

In resume, Skaffold makes development very easy: all you need to do is run skaffold dev (local dev workflow: Minikube, etc.) or skaffold run (continuous dev workflow: Jenkins, Travis CI, etc.) to start the entire process, creating Kubernetes pod(s) in a cluster with the Docker images of your application.

In this single command, Skaffold:

  1. builds container images (locally or remotely),
  2. pushes container images if the target is not local cluster,
  3. updates Kubernetes manifests with image tags,
  4. deploys your application with kubectl apply,
  5. streams logs from the pods,
  6. watches for changes in the source code and Kubernetes manifests, and then repeat 1-5.

Some learning references