devspace-plugin-loft VS devspace

I'm biased but I do think what you're describing is a good use case for Kubernetes. I work for Loft Labs, we're the company that created vcluster. We do have a commercial product called Loft that lets you manage vclusters and offer them self-service to developers. If you want to get more info on that, the web site is loft.sh.

There are some products available, for example Loft who open sourced vcluster

We run on EKS and use https://loft.sh/ to deploy development environments. The engineer runs the single service locally that they want to modify. Any other services or databases that service connects to run remotely in our Development EKS cluster using Loft and port forwards to the engineers local environment.

Lastly, one day my employer will let my run Loft so that I can provide on-demand ephemeral k8s clusters to my dev + test teams.

Have a look at https://github.com/loft-sh/kiosk and maybe the paid version https://loft.sh/

How many friends? I would recommend evaluating Loft which is free for up to 3 users.

Automate the setup of new k8s environments, ideally they should be ephemeral, disposed regularly and rebuilt by the devs themselves, on demand. This will also keep costs in check, devs don't work 24/7 so why should their cloud infrastructure? A tool worth checking would be Loft

Loft solves this + much more. There are cost-saving features too, so it might actually pay for itself. Don't hesitate to book a demo.

Loft.sh provides self-serve Kubernetes solutions for cost optimization, CI/CD, policy enforcement, user management, collaboration, and more. It helps save on Kubernetes costs by using quotas and space constraints which helps while sharing your clusters among multiple users and teams. Auto delete for idle namespaces and sleep mode for idle workloads also saves costs.

Check also devspace.sh and okteto.com

There is actually a built-in converter from docker-compose.yaml to devspace.yaml, it is part of the "devspace init" command. There are a few known issues related to it, in case you would like to contribute :)

Wrapping https://devspace.sh in my company's internal CLI to improve development experience

For Kubernetes clusters, https://devspace.sh/ allows you to iterate on your app in a running pod from your IDE. No ci/cd pipeline, no re-applying manifests; it just uploads source code from your local machine and restarts your app for you in an existing pod. Pretty slick!!! But it requires K8s, so some devs may balk at it. (Tilt and Skaffold do the same thing)

We’re excited to announce that DevSpace version 6 has been released. Thanks to everyone who used the alpha and beta versions and gave us feedback.

DevSpace is free, lets you develop natively in the cloud on any K8s cluster. Compatible with any multitenancy solution, policy governance, etc. Works with your IDE of choice. Declarative configuration. Supports custom pipelines and deploy logic. Can link multiple environments together. https://devspace.sh/

My favourite tool in this category is Devspace. As you've requested it is capable of building and deploying multiple images.