Skaffold

Skaffold handles the workflow for building, pushing and deploying your application, allowing you to focus on what matters most: writing code.

Skaffold is a command line tool that facilitates continuous development for Kubernetes applications. You can iterate on your application source code locally then deploy to local or remote Kubernetes clusters. Skaffold handles the workflow for building, pushing and deploying your application. It also provides building blocks and describe customizations for a CI/CD pipeline.

Features

  • Blazing fast local development
    • optimized source-to-deploy – Skaffold detects changes in your source code and handles the pipeline tobuildpush, and deploy your application automatically with policy based image tagging
    • continuous feedback – Skaffold automatically aggregates logs from deployed resources and forwards container ports to your local machine
  • Project portability
    • share with other developers – Skaffold is the easiest way to share your project with the world: git clone and skaffold run
    • context aware – use Skaffold profiles, user level config, environment variables and flags to describe differences in environments
    • CI/CD building blocks – use skaffold run end-to-end, or use individual Skaffold phases to build up your CI/CD pipeline. skaffold render outputs hydrated Kubernetes manifests that can be used in GitOps workflows.
  • Pluggable, declarative configuration for your project
    • skaffold init – Skaffold discovers your files and generates its own config file
    • multi-component apps – Skaffold supports applications consisting of multiple components
    • bring your own tools – Skaffold has a pluggable architecture to integrate with any build or deploy tool
  • Lightweight
    • client-side only – Skaffold has no cluster-side component, so there is no overhead or maintenance burden
    • minimal pipeline – Skaffold provides an opinionated, minimal pipeline to keep things simple