Telepresence lets developers run a single service locally while it behaves as if it were running inside a remote Kubernetes cluster, so they can iterate on code with their normal IDE and debugger instead of building a container, pushing to a registry, and waiting for a rollout on every change.
When you telepresence connect, the CLI installs a Traffic Manager in the cluster and establishes an encrypted tunnel from the workstation. DNS lookups for cluster services resolve locally, outbound requests from the local process are routed through the cluster so it can reach databases, queues, and other services by their in-cluster names, and environment variables and mounted volumes from the target pod are proxied to the local process. telepresence intercept then tells the Traffic Manager to redirect some or all of a target service’s traffic (optionally filtered by HTTP headers for per-developer intercepts) to the local instance, so the developer’s code becomes a live participant in the real cluster without disrupting other users.
Telepresence is a CNCF project originally built at Ambassador Labs. It is commonly used by teams whose microservice topology is too large or resource-hungry to run locally, as an alternative to Skaffold/Tilt-style rebuild loops for services with slow startup or heavy integration dependencies.