Cloud Native Developer Experiences in 2025

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Transcript

1. Cloud Native Developer Experience in 2025 Mauricio Salatino @Salaboy DevBCN 2025
2. Or… Why are we wasting so much time!!?? @Salaboy
3. @Salaboy - Ecosystem Engineer @ https://diagrid.io
4. 10 years of jBCN / DevBCN 🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳
5. Why am I here? - 2013: BarcelonaJUG presentation (jBPM) - 2014: BarcelonaJUG presentation (Drools) - 2015 Kubernetes for Java Developers by James Strachan <- Something changed - 2016: The Open Source way - 2017: Tomorrow’s Model Driven Development (preparing for Kubernetes) - 2018: imagen #1 - 2019: imagen #2 - 2020: imagen #3 - 2021: Virtual (Pandemic) Preparándonos para un mundo multi cloud - 2022: JBCNConf to DevBCN -> Historia de un desarrollador de Java que se cambia a Go en el contexto de Kubernetes - 2023: Building Platforms on top of Kubernetes - 2024: Unleashing the Power of Serverless on Kubernetes with Knative, Crossplane, Dapr & KEDA
6. I wrote a book (2021-2023) • You have learnt Kubernetes, then what? • Tools and practices that made sense together • Still, very infrastructure focused • In the process I made a lot of friends
7. Thomas Vitale wrote a book • How to use Java (Spring apps) with Kubernetes • What other tools do you need to learn to be efficient • But still, a lot of things didn’t fit into what developers are supposed to focus on
8. New Book - Nov 2024 • Part I: The Inner Development Loop ◦ With and without Kubernetes • Part II: Cloud Native Runtimes ◦ Runtimes are more than Kubernetes and Containers • Part III: The Path to Production ◦ Platform Engineering and the role of Developer Experience
9. Part I: The Inner Development Loop • Basics, the Inner Loop in context • Friction points • Examples and Tools • What happens if you add Kubernetes
13. 10 Friction Points of Developers Experience
14. 10 Friction Points of Developers Experience 1. Kicking Off a New Project 2. Setting Up a Development Environment 3. Making a Change 4. Testing a Change 5. Running a Change 6. Debugging a Change 7. Integrating a Change with the Mainline 8. Validating a Change 9. Deploying a Change 10. Observing a Change Inner Loop
15. Developer Experience Patterns 1. Development Environment Activation 2. Source to Image 3. Application Live Sync
16. Development Environments
17. Development Environments
18. Container Runtimes - Containers are useful for developers - Application dependencies, avoid installing PostgreSQL, Redis, RabbitMQ, Kafka - Podman - CNCF Incubating Project - Apache 2.0 Licensed - Healthy Community
19. #1 Pattern: Development Environment Activation CDEs @ Spring I/O 2025 by Saeed Zarinfam
20. #1 Pattern: Development Environment Activation Two different approaches • Devcontainers (containers) • NIX / Flox (without containers)
21. DevContainers (https://containers.dev/) • Spec created by Microsoft / Language independent ◦ Adopted by VSCode ◦ Jetbrains IntelliJ ◦ GitHub Codespaces
23. DevContainers Demo #1 and #2
24. Devcontainers are great but.. - Now we are dealing with containers and their limitations - Access to the host is hard - Docker out of Docker for example, makes it limited to do more complex setups - Credentials for services - Think about starting a Kubernetes cluster from a Container 🤯
25. NixOS (https://nixos.org)
27. Flox (https://flox.dev)
30. Flox Demo #3
31. The Inner Loop with Kubernetes
34. #2 Pattern: Source to Image
35. Developers and Containers Challenges - Security, Performance, Developer Experience - 9 Common Dockerfile Mistakes
36. Source to Image Different approaches • `ko` (https://ko.build) for Go • Buildpacks (https://buildpacks.io) -> Pack CLI & Packeto
37. Source to Image
38. `ko` Demo #4
39. Source to Image
40. `pack` Demo #5
41. #3 Pattern: Application Live Sync
42. DevTools Demo #7
43. #3 Pattern: Application Live Sync (cluster)
44. `ko` cluster Demo #6
45. Skaffold Demo #8
46. Part II: Cloud Native Runtimes • Containers just provide a way to run our apps • We can enable developers with more services out of the box, for that we need APIs • Brining GenAI into the mix ◦ Cursor like assistance ◦ Troubleshoot our running applications ◦ Summarize production issues
47. Part III: The Path to Production • The role of Platform Engineering on DevEx • Separating responsibilities at the right level of abstraction • Speeding up the outer-loops
48. Platform Engineering + DevExp + AI Agents • More and more teams are using LLMs ◦ Agentic Frameworks are everywhere • Platform Engineering teams struggle to enable dev teams ◦ There is an explosion of new tools, they are pretty similar but it is quite hard to unify • New friction points and patterns are popping up ◦ We are trying to bring use our experience to refine these in the book, but we need your help
49. Thanks! https://github.com/devex-on-k8s/book/