Local Development With Remote Clusters
Why develop with remote clusters?
Most teams using Garden use Kubernetes for production. This means they already have their Dockerfiles, manifests and/or Helm charts.
Garden lets them shift these resources left, without introducing friction or cognitive overload to developers, so that they can:
Run their entire project in the cloud as they develop, irrespective of its size
Share build caches with their team so that no two developers have to wait for the same build
Easily write and maintain integration and end-to-end tests
Developers barely need any dependencies on their local machines and new developers can be on-boarded in minutes
Catch "production" bugs before they end up in production
If you worry your laptop may catch fire next time you run docker compose up, remote environments might be for you.
Check out how Open Energy Market use Garden to empower developers on K8s and reduce onboarding time by a whopping 500%.
How does it work?
Developers start their day by running garden dev and deploy their project into an isolated namespace in the team's Kubernetes development cluster, re-using existing config and manifests but overwriting values as needed with Garden’s template syntax.
Teams then use Garden’s sync functionality to live reload changes into running Pods in the remote cluster, without needing a full re-build or re-deploy on every code change. There’s typically a trade of between how realistic your environment is and the speed of the feedback but with Garden you can get both.
Key features
Visualize your dependency graph, streams logs, and view command history with the Garden dashboard
Accelerate build times with remote image builds and smart caching
Hot reload your code to containers running in your local and remote Kubernetes clusters for a smooth inner loop with Code Synchronization.
Proxy local services with Local Mode
How can my team develop against remote clusters?
Teams typically adopt Garden in a few phases and using remote clusters for inner loop development tends to be one of the last ones. Each phase solves a unique problem though so its well worth the journey.
So with that in mind, here are the recommended next steps:
Go through our Quickstart guide
Check out the First Project tutorial and/or accompanying video
Add actions to build and deploy your project
Configure code syncing so you can live reload changes to the remote cluster
Join our Discord community 🌸 for access to Garden's dedicated Community Engineers and our AI chatbot 🤖 trained on our docs.
Further Reading
Examples
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