Developer Experience with Spring Boot on Kubernetes

Thomas Vitale - Systematic

As a developer, working with Kubernetes too often leads to too much cognitive load, inefficient inner development loop, and friction in the path to production. This session is structured as a series of iterations on the developer experience to improve those three aspects and boost productivity.

In the cloud-native world, being a developer might be challenging. The number of technologies and patterns to know can be overwhelming. This session presents an approach based on open-source technologies and focuses on improving the inner development loop and continuous delivery on Kubernetes. The end goal is to deliver value continuously, quickly, and reliably.

First, I’ll present several techniques for working locally effectively and productively. Should you run Kubernetes in your development environment? I’ll cover a few different options. Using Spring Boot, we’ll build a cloud-native application following the principles of test-driven development. The inner development loop will be enhanced with Cloud Native Buildpacks, Tilt, Knative, and Telepresence.

Continuous integration is a crucial practice for continuous delivery. We’ll check in code regularly, triggering an automated process to build, test, and package the application. Do you use pull requests? Relying on ArgoCD and the GitOps principles, I’ll show you how to work with temporary environments created dynamically when a new pull request is opened.

Finally, we’ll use Cartographer to glue together all these different tools and design a golden path to production on Kubernetes, providing a clear separation of concerns and letting developers focus on delivering value.