Another post inspired by our weekly internal enablement office hours [should we open this up to the public?] and a few conversations at DevOps Days Atlanta, talking about the experience with Kubernetes can reverberate some sighs. Though in our weekly enablement office hours, the blunt question was asked “well why is Kubernetes so difficult?”. Industry thought leaders would state that Kubernetes is a platform to build other platforms.

Another conversation that was recently had during our weekly field enablement office hours here at Shipa was “what exactly is a microservice?”. Certainly, a term that has been used to describe a paradigm and architectural practice. One can argue that the breaking down or decomposing of applications has been going on for decades and is not a monumental shift in computing. There are several definitions of microservices from a purist definition to a definition resembling a movement.

As the GitOps paradigm continues to evolve, different interpretations and implementations will continue to appear. SUSE Rancher Fleet is a project creating a powerful, lightweight, and scalable GitOps engine. Recently, we showed the art of the possible between Shipa and SUSE Rancher Fleet. Make sure to check out our joint solution brief where the intersection of the SUSE Rancher and Shipa stacks come together.

Depending if you are in the Northern Hemisphere, Spring is upon us. We have been busy at Shipa democratizing developer experience for all and making Kubernetes an afterthought. Grateful for all the community and customer feedback helping us make Shipa better. If you have an idea, check out our new Idea Portal where you can your own ideas. Let’s take a look at what we have delivered in the last pair of sprints.

The DevOps and Platform Engineering space certainly is one that evolves fast. As new development paradigms get consumed, supporting the development pipeline is crucial. Pushing a public release of v0.2.x on March 30th, 2022, Dagger, from the creators of Docker, is another approach in portability and consistency in CI/CD pipelines. What the Docker Container has done applications, Dagger is hoping to achieve that with CI/CD pipelines.

The beauty of Shipa is that no matter how the surrounding ecosystem changes e.g your Continuous Delivery or Infrastructure-as-Code stacks, the Shipa API stays the same. If you are curious about interacting with this mystical API, there are a lot of surrounding integrations that do that for you. Though, if you want to directly interact with the API, you can send out HTTP requests to the Shipa API itself to create any sort of integration you require.