A key aspect of a microservice architecture is to make sure individual services work in isolation. But as a developer its also important to make sure the service works in the full system. Providing developers a way to run pre-production code in a multi-service environment is challenging.

Making use of existing Helm charts and defaulting to production configuration does part of the work. Also important is being able to extend upon tools like Telepresence/Ksync for debugging in k8s. But while these great tools are available, what has been lacking is the "easy to use", single command that gives a developer a place to work with their own full, self-contained system. There are now a few open source solutions to do just that (like Garden, Acyl, & Armador). In this talk, Jeff will break down how these tools work, and what makes them different.