In the seventh episode of the Ambassador Livin’ on the Edge podcast, Kelsey Hightower, technologist at Google, discusses his thought on cloud developer experience, modern Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and explores the reality that every organisation is testing in production.
Be sure to check out the additional episodes of the "Livin' on the Edge" podcast.
Key takeaways from the podcast:
- Custom configured and bespoke production environments, which are often combined with the manual deployment of applications, can lead to many challenges “because you're just kind of shooting in the dark and crossing your fingers at every deployment.”
- Google’s internal development tooling allows engineers to automagically checkout a codebase and perform the full dev/test lifecycle via a browser-based IDE. All of the development tools and utilities are provided within this environment, and unit tests can be run automatically. When a pull request is issued there is an SLA for another engineering team to review and comment on the work.
- Engineers should make informed decisions in regard to how much to learn about the important topics of the business environment they are working in and underlying platform infrastructure. It is possible to get lost in the business details, but developing knowledge of the context and constraints to the problem being worked on helps to make the best implementation decisions. Infrastructure is a complicated topic, but understanding performance and cost implications for design choices is important.
- Every organization deploys onto a platform, whether or not they make the decision to buy a Platform as a Service (PaaS) or consciously build their own platform. Recognizing the needs of the customers (the developers) is key to building an effective platform.
- Modern platforms and PaaS can effectively run a standard 12 factor web app. The real value in a PaaS can be seen if it can easily run other workloads, such as legacy (money making) applications.
- Although there is clear value in creating open standards for infrastructure and platforms, sometimes adopting de facto or agreed upon standards are enough. For example, the iOS ecosystem is not open, but this has driven a lot of innovation and has seen the delivery and upgrade of many successful applications.
- Part of the value provided by organizations like the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) is that they aggregate projects and tools, and provide a distribution mechanism. They recognize the value of, and help implement, a governance model for each project. They also provide lifecycle management, potentially long after the original creators have moved on.
- There is no single “best practice” architecture, such as microservices or a monolithic approach. Focus instead on your goals and constraints, and choose the practices that fit this best. Learn from other organizations, but recognize that labels (“nanoservice”, “macroservices”) do not always capture the actual underlying practice.
- There is value in keeping development loops within a local context (e.g. on a developer’s laptop) for as long as possible. Use unit testing, integration testing, and mocking appropriately.
- Be conscious of test harnesses that leak the underlying abstractions of a platform being worked on, as this will couple engineers to this platform over the long term.
- Organizations are always testing in production, whether they deliberately choose to or not. Configuration is often the biggest source of problems and outages, and it can be very challenging to test this in a non-production environment. Incremental testing in production, using techniques like canary releasing and feature flagging are very powerful.
- When starting out in a career, engineers should go super deep on the technologies used within the current organization. This provides good value to the organization, and also enables them to take the context learned here and apply this to future similar problems or tools, e.g. understanding established software-based network proxies such as NGINX and HAProxy allows an engineer to understand Envoy more easily.
- In the future, innovation within the developer experience space will focus on workflows. Some platforms may specialize e.g. providing the best DevEx with ML-based application development.
