Kubernetes for Developers

Among the many advantages, Okteto allows developers to:

• Reduce local setup and eliminate integration issues by developing the same way your application runs in production
• Test your application as fast as you type code, without needing to use docker or kubectl in your inner loop cycle
• No more CPU cycles wasted in your machine. Hardware and network just limited by the power of the cloud
• Your development endpoints are always available. No need to expose your local machine to the internet through remote tunnels

Check our documentation on how to develop in Okteto Cloud to learn more.

Skaffold automates the workflow for building, pushing and deploying your application. You iterate on your application source code locally and then deploy to local or remote Kubernetes clusters.

Okteto’s philosophy is to move development entirely to Kubernetes. The Skaffold pipeline, even though automated, is still slow. With Okteto you code locally in your favorite IDE and Okteto automatically synchronizes your changes to your remote development environment. No commit, build, push or deploy required.

The main differences from tools like Skaffold are:

• Okteto decouples deployment from development. You can deploy your application with kubectl, Helm, a serverless framework or even a CI job and use Okteto later to develop any component of your application
• Use any docker image as your remote development environment, with your favourite tools. Okteto doesn’t require you to change the way you build, debug or deploy your applications. Since builds are executed in your remote development environment, you benefit from fast incremental builds, hot reloaders or the dependency caching offered by your programming language. Native builds are always faster than building images and redeploying containers
• You can integrate Okteto with your local IDE remote plugins, making it possible to execute your favourite IDE extensions and debuggers as you develop your application directly in Kubernetes
• Okteto provides bidirectional synchronization. For example, you can execute package managers like npm or pip in your remote development environment and the changes are synchronized back to your local file system

Yes. Okteto accelerates your development workflow regardless of where your Kubernetes cluster is running. If you can run kubectl apply, you can benefit from Okteto.

You can install Okteto Enterprise on any remote Kubernetes cluster. For Minikube, k3s or similar local Kubernetes clusters, you can directly use our open source CLI.