I'm part of a team that develops microservices deployed on Kubernetes in AWS EKS. We have a complex setup with multiple environments for testing (INT, QA, Staging, PROD), and each developer has a dedicated namespace in INT to avoid conflicts. The issue is, during development, we can't run the full system locally. This means every change, no matter how small, requires a full deployment process which takes a lot of time and interrupts our flow. I'm looking for ways to run and test our changes locally without going through the lengthy deployment process each time. I've heard suggestions about tools like Okteto, but I'm wondering if there are other methods or tools that could simplify this process. Any recommendations?
2 Answers
You might want to check out Skaffold. I use it along with k3s and a local insecure registry to quickly sync changes to my microservices. It allows for instant updates without requiring a complete rebuild of the image, making the process much faster!
Tilt is fantastic for what you're trying to do. It can directly target your INT cluster and will continuously rebuild your app and its container image. It hot-reloads everything in-cluster as soon as you save a file—no need to wait for PRs and new image pushes! Plus, it's open source now that Docker has acquired it.
Sounds impressive! I’ll look into Tilt for sure!