I hate that kubectl wants all the images to be already built. Instead I'm forced to keep docker-compose yaml around to actually build the damn things first. Which introduces more yaml that kubectl will insist on reading.
The documentation at the main kubernetes site is poor, and is being deprecated, but not in favour of anything new.
Give Skaffold a shot, takes a lot of the pain out of running locally. I think of it as a simple wrapper around Docker, Kubernetes, Helm and Port-Forwarding (plus other options I don't use) that makes it easy to use the same build/deploy definition to work locally or build/deploy in CI/CD.
Couple examples:
- Build the images that need it with "skaffold build"
- Can watch for changes are rebuild automatically when you "skaffold dev"
- Can automatically detect your services (or arbitrary) ports and forward them when working locally
- Advanced features like profiles and modules for supporting multiple environments
Quick iteration. More like I deploy at build time. CI/CD takes minutes to deploy to a shared environment. Rather than contending for a bottleneck, we do local development on a single node K8S environment.
Maintaining docker-compose as well is a pain, and it's repeating ourselves.
The documentation at the main kubernetes site is poor, and is being deprecated, but not in favour of anything new.