What to know about Kubernetes Development Environments
The environment you use for Kubernetes is usually your first decision when starting with the orchestration framework, and your choice influences how you develop, deploy and manage your applications. When working with an organization or creating software within a group, your Kubernetes environment also affects collaboration with your fellow developers and the integration process for changes made by the development team.
You can generally categorize Kubernetes development environments into two: the local environment and the cloud environment, with subcategories depending on the tools and managed services used as well as the level of developer access.
In this article, you will explore Kubernetes development environments and the advantages and disadvantages of each. You will also explore developing in Kubernetes with Garden and its benefits to your organizational processes.
Which Kubernetes Development Environment should you use?
Local development environments are often your first point of contact with Kubernetes. With tools such as microk8s and minikube, you can create a Kubernetes environment on your local machine. This environment is perfect for testing as you control its configuration, and you can use the isolated clusters for experiments without extra computing costs.
However, Kubernetes, as a framework, is built for cloud environments and microservice architecture systems. Therefore, your local environment often has limited resources allowing for a restricted Kubernetes deployment. Also, creating local Kubernetes development environments can be tasking compared to managed cloud environments, requiring more Kubernetes knowledge and a relatively longer configuration process.
The three most popular cloud providers, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, offer managed Kubernetes development environments. These environments allow you and your organization to create standardized clusters for your development team with centralized management of namespaces and computing resources.
Cloud Kubernetes development environments provide a realistic space resembling production conditions with theoretically infinite computing power.
Cloud environments come with more expenses than your local environments, along with the need for management of resources to better suit your development team’s needs.
In summary, use cloud environments for your large and diverse development team with varying levels of Kubernetes knowledge for tasks with exacting computing resource needs. On the other hand, a local environment is fine for small expert teams with small computing needs for testing.
Developing Kubernetes with Garden
Garden is an open-source cloud development and testing platform for Kubernetes and container environments. With Garden, you can create remote cloud Kubernetes development environments, automate your workflows, share previews among your team and run testing.
As a standalone tool, Garden can run from your CI pipeline or a developer’s machine, giving you the best of both worlds.
Conclusion
In this article, you walked through the different types of Kubernetes development environments, their advantages, and disadvantages, and explored developing with Garden.
Garden offers a framework to run your entire delivery process. Develop, test, and deploy your applications using realistic environments.
