Aiming to provide better developer experience when making contributions to kube-prometheus, whether by actively developing new features/bug fixes or by reviewing pull requests, we want to provide ephemeral developer workspaces with everything already configured (as far as tooling makes it possible).
Those developer workspaces should provide a brand new kubernetes cluster, where kube-prometheus can be easily deployed and the contributor can easily see the impact that a pull request is proposing.
Today there is 2 providers in the market:
Unfortunately, Codespaces is not available for everyone. If you are fortunate to have access to it, you can open a new workspace from a specific branch, or even from Pull Requests.
After your workspace start, you can deploy a kube-prometheus inside a Kind cluster inside by running make deploy.
If you are reviewing a PR, you'll have a fully-functional kubernetes cluster, generating real monitoring data that can be used to review if the proposed changes works as described.
If you are working on new features/bug fixes, you can regenerate kube-prometheus's YAML manifests with make generate and deploy it again with make deploy.
Gitpod is already available to everyone to use for free. It can also run commands that we speficy in the .gitpod.yml file located in the root directory of the git repository, so even the cluster creation can be fully automated.
You can use the same workflow as mentioned in the Codespaces section, however Gitpod doesn't have native support for any kubernetes distribution. The workaround is to create a full QEMU Virtual Machine and deploy k3s inside this VM. Don't worry, this whole process is already fully automated, but due to the workaround the whole workspace may be very slow.
To open up a workspace with Gitpod, you can install the Google Chrome extension to add a new button to Github UI and use it on PRs or from the main page. Or by directly typing in the browser http://gitpod.io/#https://github.com/prometheus-operator/kube-prometheus/pull/<Pull Request Number> or just http://gitpod.io/#https://github.com/prometheus-operator/kube-prometheus
