Using Skaffold for Development, Build, and Deploy

Skaffold is an open source tool that helps developers write code iteratively and automate continuous delivery pipelines for their applications. It simplifies how you develop, build, test, push, and deploy container-based applications to multiple environments (such as local dev, test, staging, and production).

Typically, if you're developing a container-based application for Kubernetes, and you want to test how it will behave in the target environment, you need to do multiple tasks, such as building the image, pushing it to a registry, configuring manifests for each target, and deploy.

Skaffold helps to perform the preceding tasks with a single command line and a single configuration file, so you don’t have to switch contexts too much.

In this chapter, we describe Skaffold and how you can use it to optimize your inner development loop, build and test your application, and deploy it to different target runtime environments...