How to create a local development environment for Kubernetes?

Question

Kubernetes seems to be all about deploying containers to a cloud of clusters. What it doesn\'t seem to touch is development and staging environments (or such).

Durin

Answer 1

Having a nice local development feedback loop is a topic of rapid development in the Kubernetes ecosystem.

Breaking this question down, there are a few tools that I believe support this goal well.

Docker for Mac Kubernetes

Docker for Mac Kubernetes (Docker Desktop is the generic cross platform name) provides an excellent option for local development. For virtualization, it uses HyperKit which is built on the native Hypervisor framework in macOS instead of VirtualBox.

The Kubernetes feature was first released as beta on the edge channel in January 2018 and has come a long way since, becoming a certified Kubernetes in April 2018, and graduating to the stable channel in July 2018.

In my experience, it's much easier to work with than Minikube, particularly on macOS, and especially when it comes to issues like RBAC, Helm, hypervisor, private registry, etc.

Helm

As far as distributing your code and pulling updates locally, Helm is one of the most popular options. You can publish your applications via CI/CD as Helm charts (and also the underlying Docker images which they reference). Then you can pull these charts from your Helm chart registry locally and upgrade on your local cluster.

Azure Draft

You can also use a tool like Azure Draft to do simple local deploys and generate basic Helm charts from common language templates, sort of like buildpacks, to automate that piece of the puzzle.

Skaffold

Skaffold is like Azure Draft but more mature, much broader in scope, and made by Google. It has a very pluggable architecture. I think in the future more people will use it for local app development for Kubernetes.

If you have used React, I think of Skaffold as "Create React App for Kubernetes".

Kompose or Compose on Kubernetes

Docker Compose, while unrelated to Kubernetes, is one alternative that some companies use to provide a simple, easy, and portable local development environment analogous to the Kubernetes environment that they run in production. However, going this route means diverging your production and local development setups.

Kompose is a Docker Compose to Kubernetes converter. This could be a useful path for someone already running their applications as collections of containers locally.

Compose on Kubernetes is a recently open sourced (December 2018) offering from Docker which allows deploying Docker Compose files directly to a Kubernetes cluster via a custom controller.