Comment by cirego
2 days ago
Interesting to see this pop up here! I’ve been using Tilt for multiple years now but the pace of development seems to have slowed down after the Docker acquisition.
I love how Tilt enables creating a local development environment that lets my services run the same in production , test and development. Greatly simplifies my service code and improved my quality.
In particular, I’d love to see Tilt be better around handling things like CRDs (there’s no way to mark a k8s_yaml as depending on a CRD being available, a frequent source of broken tilt up invocations).
Having said that, the first thing I do, when working on any new project, is to get “tilt up” working.
Things I’ve used for testing include: eBPF-based collectors for security and observability, data pipelines, helm chart development, and Kubernetes controllers. It’s very flexible and powerful for a wide range of development.
Same, being able to depend on CRDs between resources would be very useful, since a lot of my Tilt usage is about making operators or working with operators.
Happy to see new releases of Tilt even if the pace has slowed down. It's a very useful tool.
As far as I understand, this might be is the best tool for the guy who acquires a SaaS and have no clue how to develop/tweak stuff. Again still have no clue how you enable this or do you still have tilt in production. Marketing is not a big deal for tilt as far as I understand.
You bring up an interesting question -- I think Tilt works best for those that find themselves in an environment where product is delivered using a service-oriented architecture deployed to Kubernetes. It's also easy to get started within a small team in a big company.
To your other point, Tilt is to development as ArgoCD is to deployment. Tilt enables on-demand, reproducible development environments that are sufficiently high-fidelity that you can often replace your shared and/or long-lived testing clusters.
With Tilt, I test my application using the same Kubernetes specs / Kustomizations / Helm Charts that you use to deploy into production. When it comes time to deploy my application, I supply these same specs / kustomizations / charts to ArgoCD.
Because I can reuse the specs for both testing and production, I enjoy far greater testability of my application, improving quality and time to market.