Show HN: Kardinal – Building light-weight Kubernetes dev ephemeral environments

Show HN: Kardinal – Building light-weight Kubernetes dev ephemeral environments
kardinal.dev

namespace-based deploys (or telepresence too) is equally "lightweight" to Kardinal. it's just that (at least in our phrasing), those don't quite constitute a separate "environment" as state is shared between any developers working at the same time

Kardinal matches those approaches in terms of light-weightedness, but offers state isolation guarantees too (like isolation for your dbs, queues, caches, managed services, etc). so in comparison to "ephemeral environment" approaches that give state isolation, we do believe we're doing this in the most lightweight way possible by implementing that isolation at the layer of the network request rather than by duplicating deployed resources

I think the biggest hurdle to implement a solution like this is your application MUST be a 12 factor app which sadly is not the case from what I've seen. Many devs hardcode values when shipping their code and containers which make it really difficult to add nodes to a DAG. Had this change, SDLC testing would be waaay easier.

In the same space, labeling of all services is a thing. As you are annotating it can be tracked but if you had different gateways or destination routes or other things that need to be tweaked at the mesh level, it could be daunting to track it. In my case, I ensure the whole mesh representation of a version could be tracked by a label so if you had a app=vote1,version=release-4,feature=shiny you could track the shiny components across the whole cluster.

Another hurdle is you are tied to a service mesh implementation. Istio is ok but it can be a beast. It also constraints your org to implement other networking alternatives which is something we wanted to explore.

I do like the project uses Nix =).