Comparisons
Why not just use a remote debugger? #
When you use a remote debugger, you still have to deploy new code to the cluster. When you plug local code into the cloud with mirrord, you don’t have to wait for cloud deployment. Using mirrord is also less disruptive to the cluster, since the stable version of the code is still running and handling requests.
Why not just run a copy of the cluster on my machine with e.g. minikube? #
Our assumption is that some environments are too complex to run wholly on your local machine (or their components are just not virtualizable). If that’s the case with your environment, you can only run the microservice you’re currently working on locally, but connect it to your cloud environment with mirrord. Note that mirrord can also be used to connect your non-containerized process to your local Kubernetes cluster.
How is mirrord different from Telepresence? #
mirrord can be a great alternative to Telepresence. The main differences are:
- mirrord works on the process level, meaning it doesn’t require you to run a “daemon” locally and it doesn’t change your local machine settings. For example, if you run another process, it won’t be affected by mirrord.
- This means that you can run multiple services at the same time, each in a different context and without needing to containerize them.
- mirrord doesn’t require you to install anything on the cluster.
- mirrord duplicates traffic and doesn’t intercept/steal it by default.
- mirrord can be run through one of our IDE extensions: we support IntelliJ and VS Code.
More details can be found in this GitHub discussion.