We built Steiger after getting frustrated with Skaffold's performance in our Bazel-heavy polyglot monorepo. The main pain points were:
The TAR bottleneck: Skaffold forces Bazel to export OCI images as TAR files, then imports them back into Docker. This is slow and wasteful
Cache invalidation: Skaffold's custom caching layer often conflicts with the sophisticated caching that build systems like Bazel and Nix already provide.
Currently supports:
Docker BuildKit: Uses docker-container driver, manages builder instances
Bazel: Direct OCI layout consumption, skips TAR export entirely
Nix: Works with flake outputs that produce OCI images
Ko: Native Go container builds
Still early days - we're planning file watching for dev mode and (basic) Helm deployment just landed!
