Do Faster Development and Testing on Kubernetes Apps With Telepresence

Use Telepresence to instantly deploy your code change to a Kubernetes cluster

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels.

Let’s set the scene.

You are currently developing a new application. To make use of your shiny new cloud architecture, you’ve just created a AWS EKS cluster and you want to put it to good use!

Spawning an Autoscaling EKS cluster

First, you package your application as a container. Then, you run it locally to run some tests but quickly you realize it won’t be enough. After all, your app should communicate with plenty of other services and you don’t have the ability to run everything locally.

So you begin to think about building your container locally, tagging it, and then deploying it as a Kubernetes pod. Inside the cluster, your pod can reach these other external services, with the added benefit of a more realistic runtime.

But after a few tries, you quickly realize the process is slow, cumbersome, and not efficient. Each code change means repackaging and deploying your container again and again inside Kubernetes. Ugh. Talk about a waste of time!

You end up convincing yourself that testing things locally on your laptop, while still a so-so solution, is not so bad after all. Although your laptop is not a good testing environment, you need to ship features quickly.

There should be a better way!

In this article, I will review some tools available on the market, tell you which one is clearly the best, and teach you how to use it to improve your dev experience.

Table of Contents

1. The Perfect Solution
2. Kubernetes Application Development Tools
3. Using Telepresence for Fast Development Loop

The Perfect Solution

A good first step is to describe our expectations. What developer experience are we talking…