Gefyra: Blazingly-fast, rock-solid, local application development with Kubernetes.
The Problem
Building and pushing containers to test them in Kubernetes is repetitive and time-consuming. Writing and debugging code that depends on services in Kubernetes is daunting. Especially if they are not reachable during development.
The Solution
Gefyra runs local code in any Kubernetes cluster without the build and push cycle. It overlays containers in the cluster making code changes immediately available.
Core Features
Run a container instance on a developer machine and connect it to Kubernetes-based resources
You can run an arbitrary container on your local development machine that behaves as it would run within a Kubernetes cluster. It connects to Kubernetes-based resources (such as databases, APIs, or assets), making it very convenient to test a new service in the cluster or write code that depends on Kubernetes resources.
Overlay a container running within a Kubernetes Pod with a local instance
You can simply replace a container running in a Kubernetes Pod with a local container instance. That will serve the requests to that Pod from your local container instances. That makes it very convenient to test changes in a realistic production-close environment before pushing the code to CI/CD.
Gefyra offers you to
- run services locally on a developer machine
- operate feature-branches in a production-like Kubernetes environment with all adjacent services
- write code in the IDE you already love, be fast, be confident
- leverage all the neat development features, such as debugger, code-hot-reloading, overriding environment variables
- run high-level integration tests against all dependent services
- keep peace-of-mind when pushing new code to the integration environment
Quick installation
curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gefyrahq/gefyra/main/install.sh | sh -
Looking for Homebrew or Windows installation? Checkout the installation guide.
Use Cases and Demos
If you are interested in more sophisticated use cases or want to develop modern Kubernetes-based architectures, check out the use cases and demos or the media section.
Alternative to Telepresence
Compared to Telepresence, Gefyra uses a Wireguard-based VPN to connect with the Kubernetes cluster. Telepresence provides namespace-scoped connectivity with the cluster via a virtual network interface, and tunnels over gRPC.
Gefyra comes with Docker as baked-in dependency. With Telepresence, Docker is optional.
Telepresence uses a sidecar pattern to inject the container(s) needed to perform selective intercepts (the original container will receive unintercepted traffic). Gefyra instead replaces the image of the intercepted container with the Gefyra carrier image, which then redirects traffic to the local container. Gefyra can therefore support a couple of important use-cases such as the sidecar pattern (see: this medium article) which require an ability to intercept ports on the localhost.
Anyway, if you feel you need other features that Telepresence provides and Gefyra misses, please give it a go. Gefyra was heavily inspired by Telepresence.
Gefyra was designed to be fast and robust on an average developer machine and supports most platforms.