For an application developer, there is certainly a long road between an idea/feature and getting deployed into production with Kubernetes. From a development perspective, having a low barrier of entry and the ability to iterate is key. From a platform engineering/DevOps perspective, creating gains in engineering efficiency all while creating and enforcing policies that do not stifle innovation is key.
Enterprises lately are understanding the need to move their business applications to cloud. Well, one of the major contributing reasons for this move is the rising OpEx and the heavy debt of managing applications in their own environment. Cloud providers are waiting for such opportunities where enterprises are planning to migrate to cloud, the question is will it help or not?
Bringing the best software solutions to market as quickly as possible requires using automation to facilitate repetitive tasks (e.g., testing) so you can spend more time writing high-quality code. This is one of the main reasons why today’s top-performing dev teams build continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery or continuous deployment (CD) pipelines, which enable them to ship new releases faster.
We may not always know what is happening behind the scenes when we add a dependency to our projects. We expect this process to “just work” to carry on building applications. Little we may know about the level of commitment from maintainers and the amount of work needed to have everyone seamlessly use a library. Let’s hop in backstage to discover the unique way Blackfire releases its Python binaries.
Having enough time available is a struggle we all experience. Technological innovations enable us to develop and deploy software at lightning speed: Sometimes we can push more to production than our organizations’ IT environments can handle. At the same time, we want to increase customer satisfaction by reducing downtime. But how are you going to keep customer satisfaction rates high if a large majority of incidents are caused by changes?
Consider what happens if digital apps or services go down. Companies lose revenue, decrease productivity, compromise customer loyalty and the list of repercussions goes on, depending on the business. Indeed, modern business continuity is contingent on a well-functioning suite of consumer and commercial apps and services.
Running infrastructure at scale almost always guarantees dizzying complexity and anxiety-inducing pressure to maintain systems in a production environment. This is further exacerbated when multiple delivery teams require slight variations of the same infrastructure components, across several cloud providers, each with a different set of observability requirements. Gradually, production environments become large, unmanageable, difficult to change, and perhaps resembling the figure below.
