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We Ran 100 Microservices on a 16GB Laptop. No Kubernetes.

tdk-cli on September 27, 2026

Local development for a handful of services is easy. Local development for seven business domains and a hundred services is where most setups quie...
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tdk-cli •

The benchmark
Using tdk-erp-system — 100
services across Finance, HR, Inventory, Sales, Manufacturing, Supply Chain,
and Analytics — on a 16GB machine (Docker VM at ~7.75GiB):

Services All healthy after Total memory Crashes / OOM
10 8s 161 MiB 0 / 0
50 24s 829 MiB 0 / 0
100 112s 1.6 GiB 0 / 0

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tdk-cli •

I turned my two-service Compose file into two service.json files. Here is what the tool kept and what it left out.
medium.com/@alex.dykyi/i-turned-my...

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tdk-cli •

its faster!

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tdk-cli •

Try it
npm install -g @tdk-landscape/tdk-cli-core
tdk project --yes
tdk resource orders-api --type backend --stack shop
tdk up shop

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tdk-cli •
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tdk-cli •

anyone tried?

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tdk-cli •

*Thanks for reading! A few things I wanted to add that didn't fit in the post:
*

  • The benchmark isn't cherry-picked — the script and every raw run's JSON output
    are committed in the repo (scripts/benchmark/), so you can rerun it yourself
    or check our methodology: github.com/tdk-landscape/tdk-cli-c...

  • To be clear about scope: this is a local-dev tool, not a Kubernetes replacement
    for production. If you need multi-region, real autoscaling, or cluster-level
    scheduling, you still want k8s. TDK's job is making the local loop (the thing
    people usually solve with a giant docker-compose.yml or a kind cluster) fast
    and boring.

  • If you try it and hit something confusing or broken, please open an issue —
    github.com/tdk-landscape/tdk-cli-c.... There are a few
    "good first issue"-labeled ones too if anyone wants to dig into the CLI itself.

Happy to answer anything about the manifest model, the port/dependency
resolution, or why we went with Tilt over raw compose.

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UnitBuilds •

Do not follow any external links! DEV.to uses Sloan for automated messages, this is likely phishing.

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tdk-cli •

why do they not contact directly?

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UnitBuilds •

Sloan is the dedicated mod bot, if there'd be any issue, they'd email you, or you'd get an automated comment from Sloan.

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tdk-cli •

they emailed but its no reply email