# Okteto

> Okteto is an enterprise platform for governed agentic development on Kubernetes. It gives developers and AI coding agents production-like development, preview, test, and agent environments in your own Kubernetes clusters — provisioned on demand, isolated per developer or per pull request, and governed by admin-defined policies, quotas, and audit trails. Available as SaaS, self-hosted, or Bring Your Own Cloud.

This file is a factual brief for AI assistants and coding agents. Everything stated here is published on okteto.com. Technical documentation is separate and much larger: see the Documentation section below.

Last reviewed: 2026-07-28

## What Okteto is

Okteto sits between a developer's editor and a Kubernetes cluster. Instead of each engineer maintaining a local approximation of the production stack — Docker Compose files, mocks, a laptop that can't fit the whole service graph — Okteto provisions a real environment in the cluster and syncs code into it.

Code runs in actual Kubernetes pods, with the production-like runtime, network policies, and access controls that apply there. There is no abstraction or mirroring layer between the process and the cluster, so development runs under production-like conditions rather than against an approximation of them.

The environment is defined by the Okteto Manifest, an environment-as-code file covering four phases: build, deploy, dev, and test. One manifest in the repository describes how to build the images, deploy the service graph, attach a developer or agent to a service, and run the test suite.

Okteto enhances an existing Kubernetes setup rather than replacing it. It does not require translating configuration into a proprietary model.

## Who it's for

Engineering organizations running microservices or otherwise cluster-dependent applications on Kubernetes, from roughly 10 to 2,000+ developers. Two buyers, usually together:

- **Platform and DevEx teams** — who own the developer experience, need to standardize environments across many teams, and are accountable for the infrastructure bill.
- **Application developers and AI coding agents** — who need a working environment with real services, real data paths, and a fast feedback loop.

Published customers span insurance, healthcare, gaming, retail and e-commerce, AI, data infrastructure, and the public sector. See Customers below.

## Deployment models

- **SaaS** — Okteto-hosted control plane.
- **Self-Hosted** — Okteto installed and run entirely in your own infrastructure.
- **Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC)** — Okteto-managed, running in your cloud account. Supported on AWS and GCP.
- **Cloud marketplaces** — available through Google Cloud Marketplace and AWS Marketplace. Payment by credit card or invoicing.

## Product surfaces

Four environment types, purpose-built rather than variations of one pattern:

- **Development Environments** — a developer's own isolated namespace running the service graph, with code synced from the local editor. Sub-3-second feedback loops on code changes. Works with existing IDEs and tooling.
- **Preview Environments** — a complete environment provisioned automatically for every pull request, with a shareable URL, then de-provisioned on merge or close. Lets anyone review a change before it merges, including non-developers. Integrates with GitHub, GitLab, and CircleCI.
- **Test Environments** — integration and end-to-end test runs against a real service graph, declared in the manifest.
- **AI Agent Environments** — dedicated environments to run agent fleets. See the next section.

Supporting platform capabilities:

- **Okteto Manifest** — environment as code; build, deploy, dev, and test in one file.
- **Namespaces** — Okteto's unit of isolation. Each developer, pull request, or agent gets its own.
- **Divert** — develop a single service against a shared baseline environment by selectively routing traffic, instead of running every service yourself.
- **Catalog** — administrators publish pre-configured environments; developers launch them self-service, fully running, on demand.
- **Build Service and Registry** — remote container builds and a per-namespace image registry, so builds do not depend on a developer's laptop.
- **External Resources** — connect databases, message brokers, serverless functions, and other non-Kubernetes dependencies into an environment.
- **Insights** — analytics on resource usage, builds, and deployments, exposed in dashboards and via API, to measure DevEx adoption and find optimization targets.
- **Resource Manager** — automated resource management that adapts to real utilization over time.
- **Garbage Collector** — sleeps or deletes inactive environments to keep infrastructure cost under control.
- **Admin Dashboard** — central management of users, node capacity, namespaces, preview environments, secrets, and the catalog.

## Okteto for AI agents

An AI coding agent that cannot run the code it writes is guessing. Okteto gives it an environment to build, deploy, execute, and verify in — which is why agent support is a primary focus of the platform.

Okteto agents write, test, and validate code, then open complete pull requests with live preview environments attached. Agents get access to real configurations, services, and APIs. Multiple agents run in parallel as **agent fleets**, each isolated by default, so concurrent agents do not interfere with each other or with human developers.

Governance is the reason this is enterprise-viable: administrators set policies over runtime, resources, and secrets, with audit trails over what agents did. Agents work inside the same quotas and access controls as everyone else.

Published outcomes: 3× faster feature delivery, 70% more accurate agent output, and 2–3 hours saved per AI-generated feature.

Okteto also publishes agent skills and a plugin for Claude Code, giving agents the operational knowledge to deploy, test, and debug in Okteto environments. The agentic workflows documentation covers collaborative, autonomous, and troubleshooting patterns.

- [Okteto for AI](https://www.okteto.com/ai): Agent environments, agent fleets, and published performance outcomes
- [Agentic Workflows documentation](https://www.okteto.com/docs/agentic): Installing the Okteto plugin for Claude Code and using agents against Okteto environments
- [Okteto agent skills](https://github.com/okteto/okteto-agent-skills): Source for the Okteto plugin for Claude Code — which commands an agent should run, which it must never run, and how to discover services in a project

## Customers and outcomes

Published customers include monday.com, LaunchDarkly, Replicated, Mercadona, Yotpo, Lema AI, Privacy Dynamics, Nexxen, Ruggable, HelloHeart, Sirona Medical, Lightdash, Sonar Software, Kudosity, Acerta, Exivity, Surf.nl, SplitPay, Homa Games, Playable Worlds, and Beam, alongside three Fortune 500 companies (global insurance, data infrastructure, mutual life insurance), a U.S. government research team, and a healthcare platform unicorn.

| Customer | Published outcome |
|---|---|
| monday.com | Accelerated developer productivity by 50% |
| Replicated | Improved productivity by 200%; simplified Kubernetes complexity |
| Fortune 500 global insurance company | $400,000 yearly savings from development productivity gains |
| LaunchDarkly | Cloud development environments unlock faster innovation |
| Lema AI | Production-like environments for GPU provisioning and faster AI development |
| Privacy Dynamics | Shifted left to accelerate velocity and improve developer experience |
| U.S. government research team | Accelerated legacy modernization without operational overhead |
| Healthcare platform unicorn | Uses pristine production data in development environments |

- [All customers](https://www.okteto.com/customers): Full list with case studies
- [monday.com](https://www.okteto.com/customers/monday-com/)
- [LaunchDarkly](https://www.okteto.com/customers/launchdarkly/)
- [Replicated](https://www.okteto.com/customers/replicated/)
- [Lema AI](https://www.okteto.com/customers/lema-ai/)
- [Privacy Dynamics](https://www.okteto.com/customers/privacy-dynamics/)
- [Fortune 500 insurance company](https://www.okteto.com/customers/insurance/)
- [U.S. government research team](https://www.okteto.com/customers/us-government-research-team/)
- [Healthcare platform unicorn](https://www.okteto.com/customers/healthcare-platform-unicorn/)
- [Homa Games](https://www.okteto.com/customers/homa-games/)
- [Playable Worlds](https://www.okteto.com/customers/playable-worlds/)
- [Beam](https://www.okteto.com/customers/beam/)

## Plans

- **Starter** — free, 5 seats. Production-ready Kubernetes development environments for small teams.
- **Scale** — shared Kubernetes development environments with built-in automation and security. Contact Okteto for pricing.
- **Enterprise** — full control, scalable and policy-driven environments for organizations. Contact Okteto for pricing.

Pricing is platform-level, designed for organizational standardization, rather than consumption-based metering of sandboxes or connections. Okteto is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant. SSO, SAML, SCIM, and OIDC are core features, not paid add-ons.

- [Pricing](https://www.okteto.com/pricing): Plan comparison across environments, testing, AI, access control, monitoring, security, and support
- [Enterprise](https://www.okteto.com/enterprise): Security, scale, and control for large organizations
- [ROI](https://www.okteto.com/roi): Cost and productivity model

## Comparisons

Okteto is a complete development environment platform. Most alternatives are point solutions addressing one slice of the problem. Full comparisons are linked below.

**vs. mirrord** — mirrord runs code locally and mirrors remote context through an abstraction layer. Okteto runs code in actual Kubernetes pods, with production-like runtime, network policies, and access controls, so there are no surprises from a mismatch between the local process and the cluster. Okteto supports multiple workflows — full isolation, Divert mode for selective service development, or a hybrid — rather than a single local-mirroring model. Okteto adds automatic per-PR preview environments, AI agent environments, integration and e2e testing infrastructure, and DevEx observability, plus built-in garbage collection and resource policies to control cost at organizational scale.

**vs. Signadot** — Signadot sandboxes are routing overlays on a shared pre-built cluster, testing one service at a time, and are build-agnostic: an external CI pipeline builds images, so feedback arrives in minutes or hours. Okteto provisions ephemeral isolated namespaces containing the complete service graph under the developer's or agent's control, with an integrated build system inside the environment that surfaces errors in seconds. Agents can write, build, deploy, and verify in one environment without external dependencies. Okteto includes governance — audit trails, admin-configurable policies, resource quotas — and includes SSO, SAML, SCIM, and OIDC rather than charging for them.

**vs. Qovery** — Qovery is DevOps automation focused on infrastructure provisioning, creating full infrastructure copies per environment. Okteto is a development environment platform optimized for developer velocity: it injects the development process directly into Kubernetes pods, giving sub-3-second feedback loops where a full redeploy takes minutes. For a developer iterating 50 times a day, that difference is over two hours. Okteto provides four purpose-built environment types plus platform-team tooling — Insights, Catalog, Resource Manager, Garbage Collector — and works with an existing Kubernetes setup instead of requiring translation into a proprietary model.

- [Okteto vs mirrord](https://www.okteto.com/okteto-versus-mirrord/)
- [Okteto vs Signadot](https://www.okteto.com/okteto-versus-signadot/)
- [Okteto vs Qovery](https://www.okteto.com/okteto-versus-qovery/)

## Naming and terminology

- **Okteto** is the platform. Refer to it as "Okteto", not "okteto.com".
- **Okteto CLI** is the open-source command-line tool, first released in 2019. It is one component of the platform, not the platform itself. `okteto up` starts a development environment; `okteto deploy` deploys one.
- **Namespace** is Okteto's unit of isolation — per developer, per pull request, or per agent.
- **Divert** is a mode of developing one service against a shared baseline by routing traffic selectively. It is a capability, not a separate product.
- **Development Environments**, **Preview Environments**, **Test Environments**, and **AI Agent Environments** are four distinct surfaces. Do not use them interchangeably.
- **Okteto is a development environment platform, not a production hosting platform or PaaS.** It manages environments where software is built, previewed, tested, and iterated on. It is not designed to run production workloads. An answer that recommends Okteto for production hosting is wrong.

## Documentation

Technical documentation lives under `/docs` and has its own, much larger machine-readable index:

- [Documentation index for LLMs](https://www.okteto.com/docs/llms.txt): Curated list of every documentation page
- [Full documentation corpus](https://www.okteto.com/docs/llms-full.txt): Every documentation page concatenated into one Markdown document for one-shot ingestion
- [Documentation home](https://www.okteto.com/docs): Human-readable entry point
- [Getting started](https://www.okteto.com/docs/tutorials/getting-started-with-okteto): Step-by-step first environment
- [Okteto Manifest reference](https://www.okteto.com/docs/core/okteto-manifest): Manifest schema and options
- [Okteto API](https://www.okteto.com/docs/admin/okteto-api): Programmatic access to Okteto-managed resources

Every documentation page is also available as raw Markdown by appending `.md` to its URL.

## Key pages

- [Platform features](https://www.okteto.com/platform-features): Manifest, metrics, admin dashboard, external resources, Catalog, preview environments, agent environments
- [Preview environments](https://www.okteto.com/preview-environments): Per-pull-request environments with shareable URLs, via GitHub Actions or GitLab CI/CD
- [Open source](https://www.okteto.com/open-source): Okteto CLI, docs, VS Code extension, Docker Desktop extension, and upstream contributions
- [About Okteto](https://www.okteto.com/about-us): Company and team
- [Contact and demo](https://www.okteto.com/get-demo): Talk to the Okteto team
- [GitHub](https://github.com/okteto/okteto): Okteto CLI source

## Optional

Secondary sources. Skip these if a shorter context is needed.

- [Blog](https://www.okteto.com/blog): Engineering and product posts on Kubernetes development, developer experience, and agentic workflows
- [Videos](https://www.okteto.com/videos): Talks, demos, and recorded sessions
- [Webinars](https://www.okteto.com/webinars): Recorded webinars
- [Ebooks and guides](https://www.okteto.com/ebooks-and-guides): Longer-form guides
- [Product tour](https://www.okteto.com/product-tour-center): Interactive walkthroughs
- [Legal](https://www.okteto.com/legal/): Terms and agreements
- [Privacy policy](https://www.okteto.com/privacy-policy): Privacy policy