Introduction

Kardinal is a traffic control and data isolation layer that enables engineers to safely do dev and QA work within a single stable environment - think staging, or even production.

Instead of spinning up ephemeral environments with mocked services, fake traffic, and fake data, developers using Kardinal just put their service directly into a deployed environment to see how it works... without risking the stability of that environment.

Kardinal achieves this by rethinking the idea of isolated “environments”, and replacing them with isolated traffic flows.

To use Kardinal, just drop the Kardinal sidecars into your stable environment. Then run:

# Create a dev flow
kardinal create-dev-flow <service-name> <dev-image-tag>

This creates a dev flow for your service with access to all the data, traffic, and services in your stable environment.