Garden vs Skaffold

Garden is a DevOps automation tool for developing and testing Kubernetes applications. It creates production-like environments for development, testing, and CI on demand, then represents infrastructure, builds, services, and tests in a dependency-aware action graph. Graph-aware caching avoids rerunning unchanged images and tests. Garden Core uses YAML declarations to make workflows reproducible across developer machines and CI, and sync mode live-syncs changes to running deployments. Plugins cover Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform, Pulumi, and local scripts. Its Terraform provider validates and provisions infrastructure and exposes stack outputs to Garden actions; the Pulumi plugin is experimental and deploys stacks in dependency order. Garden Cloud's Remote Container Builder uses managed remote compute and shared Docker layer caches. Garden supports Linux, macOS, Windows, and self-hosted use. It requires Git 2.14 or newer, and local service builds need a local Kubernetes installation. The free tier has limits on build minutes, cache hits, and cache retention. Enterprise is a self-hosted Garden Cloud distribution installed into a customer's Kubernetes infrastructure.

Skaffold is Google’s open-source project for building, pushing and deploying applications. It runs client-side and has no component installed on a cluster. In development mode, it watches source files and can rebuild images, synchronize files, test images and redeploy when changes are detected. Its command-line interface can build, test, render, apply, deploy and clean application artifacts. Listed capabilities include policy-based image tagging, resource port-forwarding, logging and file syncing. Builder integrations include Docker, Jib, Bazel, custom builders, Buildpacks and ko. Deployment options include kubectl, kpt, Helm, Docker, Google Cloud Run, Kustomize and Render. Cloud Code provides extensions for Visual Studio Code and JetBrains IDEs. Skaffold supports Linux, macOS and Windows and is listed at free as an open-source project with standalone CLI and IDE integrations. It checks Google servers for updates by default, although that check can be disabled. Installation documentation says anonymized usage data is collected with an opt-out. Its gRPC server is not compatible with HTTPS.