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Introduction
Introduction
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What is Kurtosis?

Kurtosis is a platform for packaging and launching environments of containerized services ("distributed applications") with a focus on approachability for the average developer. What Docker did for shipping binaries, Kurtosis aims to do even better for distributed applications.

Kurtosis is formed of:

  • A language for declaring a distributed application in Python syntax (Starlark)
  • A packaging system for sharing and reusing distributed application components
  • A runtime that makes a Kurtosis app Just Work, independent of whether it's running on Docker or Kubernetes, local or in the cloud
  • A set of tools to ease common distributed app development needs (e.g. a log aggregator to ease log-diving, automatic port-forwarding to ease connectivity, a kurtosis service shell command to ease container filesystem exploration, etc.)

Go here to learn more about what inspired us to build Kurtosis.

Why should I use Kurtosis?

Kurtosis shines when creating, working with, and destroying self-contained distributed application environments. Currently, our users report this to be most useful when:

  • You're developing on your application and you need to rapidly iterate on it
  • You want to try someone's containerized service or distributed application without setting up an environment, dependencies, etc.
  • You want to spin up your distributed application in ephemeral environments as part of your integration tests
  • You want to ad-hoc test your application on a big cloud cluster
  • You're the author of a containerized service or distributed application and you want to give your users a one-liner to try it
  • You want to get an instance of your application running in the cloud without provisioning or administering a Kubernetes cluster

If you're in web3, we have even more specific web3 usecases here.

Architecture

Kurtosis has a definition language of:

  • An instruction set of useful primitives for setting up and manipulating environments
  • A scriptable Python-like SDK in Starlark, a build language used by Google’s Bazel
  • A package management system for shareability and composability

Kurtosis has a validator with:

  • Compile-time safety to quickly catch errors in test environment definitions
  • The ability to dry-run test environment definitions to verify what will be run, before running

Kurtosis has a runtime to:

  • Run multi-container test environments over Docker or Kubernetes, depending on how you wish to scale
  • Enable debugging and investigation of problems live, as they're happening in your test environment
  • Manage file dependencies to ensure complete portability of test environments across different test runs and backends

Try out Kurtosis now

Try Kurtosis now with our quickstart.

:::info If you have questions, need help, or simply want to learn more, schedule a live session with us, go here. :::