We are moving to Kubernetes at the moment. What is still miss is this “just run docker-compose up and everything works” setup. Maybe this or Draft from Microsoft is something to look into.
We wrote a short doc on the former for Kubernetes itself if you happen to be on a Mac.
https://enterprise.astronomer.io/guides/docker-for-mac/index...
As far as app code, I highly recommend building on Helm if you're not already. I imagine that's what skaffold and draft are doing behind the scenes.
Forge lets you do things like specify different profiles (QA, staging, prod) when you deploy, map branch names to profiles, do super fast incremental Docker builds, dependencies, etc.
What we've found though, over time, is that it's less about the tool and the best practices on how you use these tools -- that's something we're now spending a lot of time now since our users are showing us how they're trying to use this, and it's really fascinating.