Michael Hausenblas on Customer Focus, Building App Platforms, and Kubernetes Access Control

In this episode of the Ambassador Livin’ on the Edge podcast, Michael Hausenblas, Product Developer Advocate in the AWS Container Service Team, discusses the concept of customer focus (both end-users and internal engineering users), explores how platforms have evolved around Kubernetes, and dives into the use of RBAC and Open Policy Agent (OPA) for cluster access control.

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

Key takeaways:

• A well-integrated developer experience that allows engineers to code, test, and verify across a range of environments from local to production allows for business hypotheses to be tested rapidly and safely.
• Engineers should seek to understand the essentials of the business context in which they work. Developing knowledge of key performance indicators (KPIs) and business constraints allows engineers to design appropriately and to instrument their applications effectively.
• Developing a focus on the customer provides many benefits. The scalability and performance of systems is vitally important, but designing this should not be done at the expense of meeting customer needs in a timely fashion.
• The focus on providing value to “customers” does not only apply to end-users; the customer can also be your fellow engineer or business analyst. If you are a platform engineer, your customers are the application engineers and QA teams.
• Frameworks like Kubernetes have exposed developers to many operational concepts. Most developers these days understand ingress, networking, and application runtime lifecycles to some degree.
• Many developers want a simple Heroku-like platform-as-a-service (PaaS) experience for delivering applications. Kubernetes can provide the foundation for this, but the majority of teams adopting this technology create additional tooling to support the concept of deliverying “applications” (a higher-level concept than Pods or Services).
• Managing the software supply chain is vitally important. Code, dependencies, and deployment artifacts should be scanned and verified as secure. Using approaches such as RBAC with Kubernetes also provides control and auditing capabilities.
• The Open Policy Agent (OPA) framework is an interesting and flexible solution to defining fine-grained security policies, and when combined with technology such as the OPA Gatekeeper, this can be used to augment RBAC.
• Open standards provide good abstractions and integration points that support interoperability between systems and tools. Judicious use of these can lead to the building of extensible and flexible systems that can be scaled effectively.
• Future developer tooling will most likely focus on a function-as-a-service (FaaS)-like experience, such as AWS Lambda, and provide easy integration with other cloud service building blocks, such as machine learning (ML) APIs.