Building and deploying a Spring Boot application with Skaffold

To understand Skaffold commands and concepts better, in this section, we will build and deploy a Spring Boot Java application to a local single-node Kubernetes cluster using Skaffold.

Note

Whenever we talk about the Kubernetes cluster for local development in this book, we refer to the Kubernetes cluster with Docker Desktop, if not specified otherwise. However, Docker Desktop or minikube is not the only tool available today for running a local Kubernetes cluster. Skaffold also supports Kind https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/kind and k3d https://github.com/rancher/k3d as target Kubernetes clusters for local development.

Since this will be a sneak-peek of Skaffold, we will not cover everything in detail about Skaffold, as we are going to cover this in the upcoming chapters. I will, however, try to explain the commands used so that you can understand the exact flow. Before we dive into Skaffold, let's first...