Garden - Build, Deploy, And Test Cloud And Kubernetes Applications

Garden claims that it enables us to rapidly develop and test in remote, production-like environments, and that it eliminates hours of CI/CD pain. Let's see whether that's indeed true by putting it to a test with a Kubernetes cluster.
#garden #development #kubernetes
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▬▬▬▬▬▬ 🔗 Additional Info 🔗 ▬▬▬▬▬▬
➡ Gist with the commands: gist.github.com/9e5864c5f9e79...
🔗 Garden: garden.io
🎬 Skaffold - How to Build and Deploy In Kubernetes: • Skaffold - How to Buil...
🎬 DevSpace - Development Environments in Kubernetes: • DevSpace - Development...
🎬 Development Environments Made Easy With Tilt Rebuilds And Live Updates: • Development Environmen...
🎬 Should We Replace Docker Desktop With Rancher Desktop?: • Should We Replace Dock...
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▬▬▬▬▬▬ ⏱ Timecodes ⏱ ▬▬▬▬▬▬
00:00 Introduction To Garden
00:59 Garden Setup
09:26 Deploying Kubernetes Applications With Garden
22:52 Continuous Deployments With Garden
27:57 Testing And Workflows With Garden
31:38 Garden Providers And Modules
33:27 Garden Pricing
25:44 Garden Pros And Cons

[@DevOpsToolkit]

What do you think about Garden? Does it really shine at developing, testing, CI/CD, and other areas it claims it dominates?

[@DylanRiley2011]

This video was exceptionally well-done. Thanks so much for this. There are myriad points that you made here that we need to address, and we will, but very few folks have crystallized them and made them so clear as you've done here. I'll leave it to our pros to address your points one by one, but your dissection of the issues here is really meaningful and we take it to heart. We're a small team trying to move mountains, and this sort of evaluation is invaluable 🙇

[@DevOpsToolkit]

That's great to hear. Ping me if there's anything I can do to help.

[@discoline10191]

Okteto vs Garden is an important consideration for me. I'm very impressed with Okteto and I'm stoked about this video!

[@DevOpsToolkit]

Great! I'll start working on it soon (and probably add a few others to make the comparison more interesting).

[@discoline10191]

@@DevOpsToolkit I just finished your video. I've been playing with Okteto for the last week, and I think it fixes the issues I've had with local setups like minikube. Garden doesn't seem to be reducing configuration complexity. I'd rather outsource it to something like Okteto and be done. It's well worth the price IMO. Okteto+CircleCI is a powerful combo that our company is using right now.

[@aleermapiou2092]

Yes please do the comparison video :)

[@DevOpsToolkit]

Already moved it close to the top of my todo list :)

[@mateuszszczecinski8241]

Dziękujemy.

[@DevOpsToolkit]

Thanks a ton!

[@KnThSelf2ThSelfBTrue]

I don't think garden looked great here. It seems like the one thing that makes it unique from other build/deploy solutions is its testing primitives, and I would have like to see garden really shine by understanding the modules impacted by a particular change to a project, and intelligently running integration tests as I roll out changes while maintaining good test isolation, but I didn't really see that here.

[@DevOpsToolkit]

Me neither. That's why I wasn't very positive about it.

[@hamza201183]

Hi Viktor, I just came across Acorn, do you know it?

[@DevOpsToolkit]

I do know it superficially. It's on my TODO list to go deeper...

[@DevOpsToolkit]

th-cam.com/video/uj6Gan10Wig/w-d-xo.html

[@shamstabrez2986]

FIRST OF ALL CONTENT IS LIKE NORMAL SHOULD FIRST DEFINE WHT PROBLEMS GARDENS ACTLLY SOLVED U DIDNT TALKED ABOUT DAT N STARTING A LECTURE ON THIS TOPIC

[@theo22037]

I’m a long time garden user and It’s a bit strange that your video doesn’t mention the main features that give it alot of its value. These features are the dependency graph and build and test caches. With the dependency graph you can declaratively create dependencies between builds, tasks, tests and services and garden manages the order they get executed. No need to have complicated orchestration pipelines in your cicd system thats call different pipelines. Garden configs can codify all that.
Since garden versions builds, tests, tasks and services, based on the garden configs and source files that make up each type, it knows if it needs to run a build, test, task or deploy by looking these up in its cache. If no config, source files or depedencies have changes it uses the cached result so ci/cd can be a lot faster if someone has already run garden with the same code.
It’s also not true that garden doesn’t work with polyrepos: docs.garden.io/advanced/using-remote-sources and that’s it meant to be a replacement for your cicd platform. We use GitHub actions and garden workflows and they compliment each other well.
As for the size and scope of garden it’s the result of being agnostic about the tools that are used. It has the primitives to handle most development tasks but allows the developer to choose what tools they want to use. I do agree that sometimes there are bugs that probably should have been caught by the dev team earlier and that the documentation could use improvement, but garden is a powerful tool if you teams spend the time to use it properly.
Perhaps a follow up video that goes over the dependency graph and build and test caches would be useful to your subscribers.

[@DevOpsToolkit]

You're right. I did not put enough focus on monorepos where the dependency graph does provide more value than I explained. Nevertheless, my problem is that there are deficiencies that prevent Garden from being taken seriously by Kubernetes users. I would say that Garden failed to embrace it and follow it's principles. It is not a bad tool but, rather, it tries to do too much and it needs to figure out what it's focus is.
As it is now, I cannot use it seriously to manage apps all the way until production.
I am planning to make another video later hoping that the issues are resolved and we can focus on its core promise (like, as you said, the dependency graph).