Tilt
Today we have a new episode of the podcast out with Nick Santos from Tilt. Tilt is a developer tool to make it easier to develop a modern application that’s based on microservices and most likely Kubernetes. The conversation ranged from the origin story of Tilt to where the CNCF and great ecosystem is headed. It was both fun and informative and generally a great chat! 🎙️
Issue #157
Our podcast guest, Nick Santos, is the CEO and cofounder of Tilt. Live updates to running k8s clusters are non trivial and can really speed up your developer workflow, that's one of the big benefits that caught our eye when running Tilt. There's a lot more to learn about this OSS project, but in the meantime give the podcast a listen! Nick is experienced and knowledgeable about what makes a good dev environment, and where the ecosystem is going. Lots to learn from this one.
Tilt is all about making your developers faster and this post by them has some great tips on speeding up your Dockerfiles. This is all of the stuff you maybe didn’t know about Dockerfiles and the Dockerfile ecosystem that can benefit your docker build performance. From .dockerignore to cache, and some steps to debug why an image is slow, this post from the Tilt team is full of great advice. 🦥
I learned about this post from the Tilt blog, and it’s incredibly relevant. I’ve been fighting some problems around docker image build performance in our dev environment. This post shows some alternatives to building container images using different tools, and then explains why each might be a good choice to solve problems. There doesn’t seem to be a universal “right way”, but there might be a “right way” for a specific use case. 🏗️
Here’s a clever utility that’s useful in dev environments. Often our services are running in remote dev environments, and we need to occasionally port-forward to a database, an internal service, etc. Remembering the kubectl port-forward syntax and port numbers can be annoying and difficult, and here’s a handy open source utility that will make sure your port forwards stay open in the background for you.
This is a great explanation showing how kubectl is working, and how the Kubernetes API server works. Kubernetes can be intimidating at first, and if you aren’t sure how it’s all working, this is a great article to read early. The tldr of this post is showing that kubectl is making GET, POST, PATCH (etc) REST requests to the Kubernetes API server, and formatting the output for you.
A great tutorial/how-to from the Cluster API sig on how to iterate on cluster dev using Tilt. It shows the power of Tilt and what sets Tilt apart from other tools. This example really shows the flexibility of Tilt – it can even be used to build and iterate on core Kubernetes features (Cluster API), not just user-space applications running in K8s. 📚
Maybe that Argo/Flux collaboration that we were promised at KubeCon in San Diego is happening!
