Telepresence allows developers to test applications locally that are deployed to Kubernetes clusters. It creates a network proxy between a local development environment and a pod running in the cluster, enabling local development and testing that reflects the cluster environment. Key features include deploying and debugging services locally without changing code in the cluster. The document provides an overview of Telepresence and examples for installing it and using it to swap a deployment for local development of both a Python HTTP server and Docker container-based application.