Cross-platform and multi-platform build support

Skaffold selectively supports building for an architecture that is different than the development machine architecture (cross-platform build) or building for multiple architectures (multiple-platform build). The target platforms for an artifact can be specified in one of the following ways:

• The pipeline’s platforms property in the skaffold.yaml file.

build:
  platforms: ["linux/arm64"]
  artifacts:
    - image: example

• The artifact’s platforms constraints in the skaffold.yaml file. This overrides the value specified in the pipeline’s platforms property.

build:
  artifacts:
    - image: app1
      platforms: ["linux/arm64"]
    - image: app2
      platforms: ["linux/amd64"]

• The CLI flag --platform which overrides the values set in both the previous ways.

skaffold build --platform=linux/arm64,linux/amd64

Additionally, for skaffold dev, skaffold debug and skaffold run commands, where the build output gets deployed immediately, skaffold checks the platform for the kubernetes cluster nodes and attempts to build artifacts for that target platform.

The final list of target platforms need to ultimately be supported by the target builder, otherwise it’ll fail the build. The cross-platform build support for the various builders can be summarized in the following table: