Paris Apostolopoulos on Developers Getting Closer to Production and Cloud Specialists

In this episode of the Ambassador Livin’ on the Edge podcast, Paris Apostolopoulos, Java developer and cloud engineer, discusses the benefits of developers getting closer to production, and the role of cloud specialists.

Be sure to check out the additional episodes of the "Livin' on the Edge" podcast.

Key takeaways:

• There are many case studies that present the benefits of continuous integration and continuous delivery. However, even in 2020, not every organisation is fully committed to embracing this way of building and delivering software.
• With the rise of DevOps and the cloud native approach to delivering software, developers are “getting closer to production”. This enables them to write software that better takes advantage of the target infrastructure, and also allows them to get quicker feedback from users.
• There is much to learn about cloud technologies. Developers should seek to expand outside of their comfort zone. To be effective, engineers have to continually learn new skills.
• Using cloud native architectures, such as microservices, is fundamentally about three things: modularization, encapsulating functionality behind appropriate interfaces, and allowing independent release.
• Container technologies like Docker enabled a more effective and flexible way in which developers could package their applications. This technology also helped to break down the boundaries between developers and operations.
• Kubernetes was the “missing part of the container puzzle”, which enabled deployment at scale, and provided a foundation on which to build a cloud platform. However, there is a big jump from using Kubernetes for a personal project, to running this in production.
• Getting traffic from users to backend services can be challenging. The Kubernetes Ingress specification offers the lowest common functionality. There are many other Ingress and API gateways solutions; engineers should experiment with these in order to understand the benefits and challenges.
• Although it is easy to get started by using cloud vendor ingress solutions, there can be scalability and security limitations that may appear later. For example, scaling the use of multiple cloud load balancers can be expensive.
• In the future, engineers may become more focused on individual clouds, and develop their skills accordingly. Although each cloud vendor offers core computing, networking, and storage services, they are often configured differently, and the useful “value add” services that abstract away complexity are proprietary to each vendor.
• Also in the near future, Kubernetes itself may "disappear into the platform", and the current approach to creating "serverless" applications may become more popular.