Skaffold

Skaffold is an open-source command-line tool from Google designed to streamline the development workflow for containerized applications on Kubernetes. It automates the process of building, pushing, and deploying applications, allowing developers to focus on writing code rather than managing infrastructure complexities. Skaffold provides a tight and optimized inner loop, offering instant feedback during development by quickly deploying changes. Skaffold is client-side only, meaning it has no on-cluster components, which eliminates overhead and maintenance burdens on Kubernetes clusters. It supports various environments through profiles, local user configurations, environment variables, and flags, making it easy to share projects and adapt to different deployment scenarios. The tool integrates with existing build and deployment tools like Helm, Kustomize, and Kaniko through its plugin architecture, replacing the need for bespoke scripts and utilities.