What is Skaffold?
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 can also be used in an automated context such as a CI/CD pipeline to leverage the same workflow and tooling when moving applications to production.
Skaffold is a tool in the Container Tools category of a tech stack.
Skaffold is an open source tool with GitHub stars and GitHub forks. Here’s a link to Skaffold's open source repository on GitHub
Who uses Skaffold?
Companies
17 companies reportedly use Skaffold in their tech stacks, including Platform, Billx, and web-app.
Developers
66 developers on StackShare have stated that they use Skaffold.
Skaffold Integrations
Skaffold's Features
- No server-side component. No overhead to your cluster.
- Detect changes in your source code and automatically build/push/deploy.
- Image tag management. Stop worrying about updating the image tags in Kubernetes manifests to push out changes during development.
- Supports existing tooling and workflows. Build and deploy APIs make each implementation composable to support many different workflows.
- Support for multiple application components. Build and deploy only the pieces of your stack that have changed.
- Deploy regularly when saving files or run one off deployments using the same configuration
Skaffold Alternatives & Comparisons
What are some alternatives to Skaffold?
Helm
Helm is the best way to find, share, and use software built for Kubernetes.
Argo
Argo is an open source container-native workflow engine for getting work done on Kubernetes. Argo is implemented as a Kubernetes CRD (Custom Resource Definition).
Docker Compose
With Compose, you define a multi-container application in a single file, then spin your application up in a single command which does everything that needs to be done to get it running.
Jib
Jib builds Docker and OCI images for your Java applications and is available as plugins for Maven and Gradle.
Spinnaker
Created at Netflix, it has been battle-tested in production by hundreds of teams over millions of deployments. It combines a powerful and flexible pipeline management system with integrations to the major cloud providers.
