[eysi]

To add to what's already been said: If you think about it, CI pipelines are typically a complete description of how your system is built, tested, and deployed.

Which is pretty fantastic except for how walled off they are. You can't really re-use these descriptions for e.g. development, they're not vendor agnostic, and they only way to run them is by pushing your code.

Maybe it's a silly analogy but it's almost like being a web dev that doesn't have a browser and needs to send their code to a friend who can tell them if that font size looks good.

I think we're way over due for freeing these "blueprints" of our system from the confines of CI and making them portable and flexible. And containers are the technology that's enabling that.

Full disclaimer (as always): I work at Garden[0] where we're also solving that problem but taking a slightly different approach to Dagger (it's still a DAG). Garden config is declarative and the jobs (we call them actions) have a semantic meaning. You can e.g. have a Build action of type container or a Deploy action of type Helm and Garden will figure out what to do with it.

We've also put a lot of emphasis on the inner loop development story with hot reloading functionality, log streaming and more.

[0] https://github.com/garden-io/garden

[shepherdjerred]

Is garden suitable for smaller projects? I've stumbled upon it before, but it just looks so intimidating.

[eysi]

Yes for sure!

We did indeed have a reputation for being a bit more complicated then some of the other tools out there (and in turn more flexible). But we've put enormous effort into simplifying Garden itself and also improving documentation.

If you already have your stack containerised you should be good to go but experience with Kubernetes is definitely a plus. Most of our users use K8s in production and use Garden for developing and testing in production-like environments in "inner loop" dev and CI.

You can check out our quickstart guide, it can get you up and running in a few minutes: https://docs.garden.io/getting-started/quickstart

We're also always happy to help on Discord if you have questions: https://discord.gg/FrmhuUjFs6