As more organizations shift towards cloud native software approach, whether it be tight or loosely coupled technique, the challenging part is to provide developers with development environments that can support a smooth transition.On the cloud native palette there are a couple of tools that can provide this loop for developers with one topic in focus - “write code”. <h2>What is Skaffold? </h2><a href="https://skaffold.dev/" target="_blank">Skaffold</a> is an open-source project released by Google with some key areas that covers: <ul><li>It is lightweight client-side only tool, that developers can easily install on local machine&nbsp;</li><li>It must works everywhere, meaning easy share project with other developers</li><li>If covers all container and <a href="https://kubernetes.io/" target="_blank">kubernetes</a> features that makes developers productive more</li><li>It must provide continuous feedback to developers while developing</li></ul> Now that I get your attention, shall we dive a little further? <h2>Prerequisites </h2>In order to follow my presentation, I’ve prepared code available for you at <a href="https://github.com/Igor992/skaffold-demo" target="_blank">skaffold-demo</a>There is Makefile, just in case that you’re wish to follow along with the reading this blog <img src="https://cyberlabimages.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/prva.png" style="width: 600px; height: 239px; display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="code available for you at skaffold-demo"> When we finish this setup you can use make all to get all-at-once prepared, but for now let’s start step-by-step.By that said, use make tools and you will be prepared on tools that we will need on local machine * in my case this is already up-to-date<img src="https://cyberlabimages.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/slika-2.png" style="width: 599px; height: 220px; display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="use make tools and you will be prepared on tools that we will need on local machine"> <h3 style="text-align: left;">Setup local cluster </h3>We will use Kind as a local cluster that operates over Docker installed on your machine.&nbsp; I will assume that you know what Docker is and that it is already installed on your machine.As a good practice I always run the below command to keep the machine clean. docker system prune --all --force --volumes Now run make cluster and wait couple of minutes (time for coffee)<img src="https://cyberlabimages.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/Screenshot-2025-04-28-at-12.54.18.png" style="width: 600px; height: 280px; display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="use Kind as a local cluster that operates over Docker installed on your machine">At this point you should get pointed to kind context locally as<img src="https://cyberlabimages.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/Screenshot-2025-04-28-at-12.56.32.png" style="width: 599px; height: 146px; display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="At this point you should get pointed to kind context locally as"><h3 style="text-align: left;">Setup ingress controller </h3>You can skip this if you want, but I prefer to set up ingress and prepare later locally trusted development certificates.If want to follow use make ingress and wait until we met the condition meaning that’s all good and running to be used inside this local cluster. <img src="https://cyberlabimages.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/slika-6.png" style="width: 601px; height: 257px; display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="set up ingress and prepare later locally trusted development certificates."> <h3 style="text-align: left;">Provide registry </h3>This section we need to provide in order to tag our local images. It will ask you for input based on you desired registry. In this case Dockerhub as you can see below <img src="https://cyberlabimages.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/slika-7.png" style="width: 600px; height: 146px; display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="This section we need to provide in order to tag our local images."> NOTE: For this demo, as you will see later we will not push those images, instead we will use them locally from Kind cluster. If you want for any reason to push those to Dockerhub, you will need to prepare <a href="https://docs.docker.com/reference/cli/docker/login/" target="_blank">connection</a> and change skaffold.yaml at section `local.push = true` As placeholder code has `<registry>` on two location <a href="https://github.com/Igor992/skaffold-demo/blob/main/helm/values.yaml" target="_blank">helm values</a> and <a href="https://github.com/Igor992/skaffold-demo/blob/main/voting-app/skaffold.yaml" target="_blank">skaffold</a>. When you provide above information those will be changed.</registry> <h3 style="text-align: left;"><registry>Generate images </registry></h3><registry>Now that we have a cluster ready for usage, we need to prepare images locally for our demo application.For this we use make skaffold.</registry><registry> </registry><registry><img src="https://cyberlabimages.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/slika-8.png" style="width: 600px; height: 417px; display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="we need to prepare images locally for our demo application.For this we use make skaffold." alt="s you can see it will use at this point something new as skaffold build –profile This is coming from skaffold.yaml spec that we have under voting-app directory.Here build act as control how artifact will be build and –profile control order of building those artifacts,"></registry><registry> </registry><registry>As you can see it will use at this point something new as skaffold build –profile This is coming from skaffold.yaml <a href="https://github.com/Igor992/skaffold-demo/blob/main/voting-app/skaffold.yaml#L73-L76" target="_blank">spec</a> that we have under voting-app directory.Here build act as control how artifact will be build and –profile control order of building those artifacts, as we have two profiles minus sign e.g. -seed-image excludes that <a href="https://github.com/Igor992/skaffold-demo/blob/main/voting-app/skaffold.yaml#L105-L108" target="_blank">profile</a> to be executed.</registry><registry> </registry><h3 style="text-align: left;"><registry>Trust development cluster </registry></h3><registry>We will now add these locally trusted certificates for our development application by make certs</registry><registry><img src="https://cyberlabimages.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/Screenshot-2025-04-28-at-13.22.29.png" style="width: 600px; height: 313px; display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="We will now add these locally trusted certificates for our development application by make certs"></registry><registry>Last one in order to use configured ingress with trusted certificates we need to change /etc/hosts over make hosts.&nbsp; This will require from you to allow this (type your password) so we can add two entries as </registry><registry>127.0.0.1&nbsp;dev-vote.kind.local dev-result.kind.local</registry><registry> </registry><h2 style="text-align: left;"><registry>Deploy application </registry></h2><registry>*Application is for demo purpose only&nbsp; and not focused on best-precites on Docker images and other container topics.</registry><registry> </registry><registry> Under the voting-app directory you will see skaffold.yaml <a href="https://github.com/Igor992/skaffold-demo/blob/main/voting-app/skaffold.yaml" target="_blank">definition</a>. Let’s give a short introduction into this configuration before we use it. </registry><registry> </registry><registry> In this demo we are going to use stable skaffold/v3 schema version followed by three profiles. </registry><ul><li><registry>local-develop</registry></li><li><registry>vote-</registry><registry>images</registry></li><li><registry>seed-image</registry></li></ul><registry></registry><registry></registry> <registry>Profile <a href="https://github.com/Igor992/skaffold-demo/blob/main/voting-app/skaffold.yaml#L73" target="_blank">vote&nbsp;</a></registry><registry><a href="https://github.com/Igor992/skaffold-demo/blob/main/voting-app/skaffold.yaml#L73" target="_blank">images</a> and <a href="https://github.com/Igor992/skaffold-demo/blob/main/voting-app/skaffold.yaml#L105" target="_blank">seed-image</a> we already used over make skaffold step before. This prepared locally for us three images for result, vote and worker services and one more seed-data, to be able to provide fake clicks and populate the database.</registry><registry><img src="https://cyberlabimages.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/Screenshot-2025-05-06-at-08.46.23.png" style="width: 600px; height: 177px; display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="his prepared locally for us three images for result, vote and worker services and one more seed-data"></registry><registry>In order to deploy the whole stack on our local cluster, we are going to use a local-develop <a href="https://github.com/Igor992/skaffold-demo/blob/main/voting-app/skaffold.yaml#L6" target="_blank">profile</a> over command skaffold dev</registry><registry> </registry><registry><img src="https://cyberlabimages.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/slika-11.png" style="width: 600px; height: 234px; display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="In order to deploy the whole stack on our local cluster, we are going to use a local-develop profile over command skaffold dev" alt="As we already prepared images before, it will use local ones.You can see part when we hit the deploy phase of our configuration defined under skaffold.yaml file (Starting deploy…)"></registry><registry> </registry><registry>As we already prepared images before, it will use local ones.You can see part when we hit the deploy phase of our configuration defined under <a href="https://github.com/Igor992/skaffold-demo/blob/main/voting-app/skaffold.yaml#L40" target="_blank">skaffold.yaml</a> file (Starting deploy…)</registry><registry>Images will be loaded under a local cluster, in our case Kind. </registry><registry>To be able to check those use command below</registry><registry>docker exec -it $(kind get clusters | head -1)-worker crictl images </registry><registry>This will interact with one of the nodes locally and print images that’s there present.</registry><registry><img src="https://cyberlabimages.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/Screenshot-2025-05-06-at-09.01.27.png" style="width: 600px; height: 100px; display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="Images will be loaded under a local cluster, in our case Kind."></registry><registry>*There are other images also present in node</registry><registry> </registry><registry>Wait a bit to stabilize deployment as we have checks that perform if redis and database are first ready for connection.</registry><registry> </registry><registry><img src="https://cyberlabimages.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/slika-13.png" style="width: 600px; height: 284px; display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="Wait a bit to stabilize deployment as we have checks that perform if redis and database are first ready for connection."></registry><registry> </registry><registry>At this point skaffold will perform next job for development lifecycle </registry><registry></registry><ul><li><registry>allow <a href="https://cyberlab.rs/team" target="_blank">developers</a> access to redis and database locally</registry></li><li><registry>constantly loop over changes under three services</registry></li><li><registry>if there is any code change made by developer it will sync those</registry></li></ul> <img src="https://cyberlabimages.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/slika-14.png" style="width: 600px; height: 148px; display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="At this point skaffold will perform next job for development lifecycle" alt="In order for this to work, under the hood it uses the kubectl cp command and if you ever worked with this one, it is required to have tar binary installed under a running container.Another catch is to allow the service to reload its process on file changes."><registry> </registry><registry>In order for this to work, under the hood it uses the kubectl cp command and if you ever worked with this one, it is <a href="https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/kubectl/generated/kubectl_cp/#examples" target="_blank">required</a> to have tar binary installed under a running container.Another catch is to allow the service to reload its process on file changes.This will add hot code reloading ability so that we can live see changes after sync.For this we always have separate image that will skaffold use during development and not the same one as we bake for the production best-practice usages.In our case as we use <a href="https://docs.gunicorn.org/en/latest/settings.html#reload" target="_blank">gunicorn</a> we added flag `--reload` to support this process changes.</registry><registry> </registry><h2 style="text-align: left;"><registry>Simulate voting </registry></h2><registry>At this point as this dummy application supports one vote per time, we will simulate that we have “external” users to perform this voting for us.</registry><registry>For this we first needs to push image inside Kind over </registry><registry>kind load docker-image igor992/seed-data -n develop where it will add this on each nodes for usage</registry><registry></registry> <registry>Then just use command kubectl run seed-data --namespace dev --rm --tty -i --restart='Never' --image igor992/seed-data:latest </registry><registry>Wait a bit and it will populate “fake” votes on our application. That will be shown as result over <a href="https://dev-result.kind.local" target="_blank">https://dev-result.kind.local</a>&nbsp;And if you really want jump into locally database to validate those also psql --host localhost --port 5432 --no-password --username postgresSELECT id,vote FROM public.votes; To prove that redis is also there use redis-cli INFO server or redis-cli ping to get response as pong</registry><registry> </registry><h2 style="text-align: left;"><registry>Conclusion</registry></h2><registry>With this presentation I wanted to bring closer to developers a new approach on how development can be faster in terms of cloud computing service. If this implements another layer of shit-left practice, <a href="https://cyberlab.rs/team" target="_blank">developers</a> get feedback much faster even before the first real image gets deployed as permanent to be shared with the rest of the team. </registry><registry> </registry><registry> With this said, keep learning each day something different and new is what makes a cloud native experience more fun. </registry><registry> </registry> <registry>For more information on <a href="https://kubernetes.io/" target="_blank">Kubernetes</a> and <a href="https://skaffold.dev/" target="_blank">Skaffold,</a> feel free to visit their official websites, which I also referenced while writing this blog. Until my <a href="https://cyberlab.rs/blog" target="_blank">next blog</a>,</registry><registry> </registry><registry> Happy Helming! 👋</registry>

Set up a local Kubernetes cluster with Kind, deploy a demo app, and boost development speed using Skaffold for seamless testing and iteration.

Kubernetes Development with Skaffold