Garden

Garden is a development automation platform by Berlin-based Garden.io that lets teams spin up production-like Kubernetes environments on demand for development, testing, and CI, all driven by a single garden.yml configuration. It builds a directed acyclic graph of build, deploy, test, and run actions, executing independent steps in parallel with smart caching, so only the minimum required work runs when files change. A sync mode live-reloads code into running services for a fast inner development loop against real infrastructure.

The core is open source under MPL-2.0 (around 3.5k GitHub stars), with cloud and enterprise editions from the company. In April 2025 Garden announced the next generation of Garden Cloud alongside Garden 0.14. Limitations: it is focused on Kubernetes workflows and adds limited value outside them, the configuration model has a learning curve for teams new to the stack graph approach, and it lacks the GitOps-native deployments, secrets governance, and built-in CI/CD of fuller internal developer platforms.

Install the Garden CLI, add a garden.yml to your project, and run garden deploy or garden dev; follow the quickstart at docs.garden.io.