Skaffold is a command-line tool from Google that automates the build, push, and deploy inner loop for Kubernetes applications. Running skaffold dev watches a source tree, rebuilds container images on change, pushes them to a registry, and applies the resulting manifests to a target cluster, giving developers a continuous feedback loop without bespoke scripts.
Its pipeline is defined in skaffold.yaml and is pluggable at every stage. Builders include Docker, Buildpacks, Bazel, Jib, ko, and Kaniko. Deployers include kubectl, Helm, Kustomize, and kpt. A file sync mode can copy changed files straight into running containers to skip image rebuilds for interpreted languages. Profiles override config per environment, and port-forwarding plus log aggregation stream output from every pod in the session.
Skaffold is commonly used as the engine behind Cloud Code for VS Code and IntelliJ, and sits alongside Tilt and Garden as one of the standard ways to get a fast local-to-cluster dev loop without locking into a particular build or deploy tool.