Guides on Skaffold

Getting Started With Your Project

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Skaffold requires a skaffold.yaml, but - for supported projects - Skaffold can generate a simple config for you that you can get started with. To configure Skaffold for your application you can run skaffold init.

Running skaffold init at the root of your project directory will walk you through a wizard and create a skaffold.yaml that defines how your project is built and deployed.

skaffold init

What’s next

You can further set up File Sync for source files that do not need a rebuild in dev mode.

skaffold dev

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

skaffold dev enables continuous local development on an application. While in dev mode, Skaffold will watch an application’s source files, and when it detects changes, will rebuild your images (or sync files to your running containers), push any new images, test built images, and redeploy the application to your cluster.

skaffold dev is considered Skaffold’s main mode of operation, as it allows you to leverage all of the features of Skaffold in a continuous way while iterating on your application.

Debugging With Skaffold

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Skaffold lets you set breakpoints and step through your application, even when deployed to remote Kubernetes clusters, as if the code were running locally on your machine. Skaffold detects the language runtimes of your container images, reconfigures the pods for debugging, forwards debugging ports, and then monitors for when debuggable containers come online. IDE integrations like Cloud Code leverage Skaffold’s events to automatically set up debugging sessions.

Debugging is currently supported for five language runtimes.

Continuous Delivery

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Note

Skaffold is used under the hood to power Google Cloud Platform’s Cloud Deploy API. See the docs here for more information on how to use Skaffold + Cloud Deploy for CI/CD

Skaffold provides several features and sub-command “building blocks” that make it very useful for integrating with (or creating entirely new) CI/CD pipelines. The ability to use the same skaffold.yaml for iterative development and continuous delivery eases handing off an application from a development team to an ops team.

Managing ARM workloads [NEW]

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Skaffold has a lot of intelligence built-in to simplify working with ARM workloads. Whether developing on an Apple Silicon Macbook that uses an ARM based chip, or deploying to a GKE Kubernetes cluster having ARM nodes, Skaffold can take away the complexities that arise when the architecture of your development machine and Kubernetes cluster don’t match.

Why is image architecture important?

Container images are built targeting specific Instruction Set Architectures like amd64, arm64, etc. You must use container images that are compatible with the architecture of the node where you intend to run the workloads. For example, to deploy to a GKE cluster running ARM nodes, the image needs to be built for linux/arm64 platform.