Cloud Native Computing Foundation KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022, 1 Jun 2022

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From YouTube: Keynote: PlatformOps: It’s all about Developer Experience - Ben Hale, Technical Lead, VMware Tanzu

Description

Don’t miss out! Join us at our upcoming hybrid event: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2022 from October 24-28 in Detroit (and online!). Learn more at https://kubecon.io. The conference features presentations from developers and end users of Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, and all of the other CNCF-hosted projects.

Keynote: PlatformOps: It’s all about Developer Experience - Ben Hale, Technical Lead, VMware Tanzu

Kubernetes has reached mainstream adoption, with 5.6 million developers using it worldwide. But, organizations are still challenged to make developers productive using Kubernetes. PlatformOps teams are now being asked to build, run, and manage platforms that lead with developer experience.

This requires embracing a PlatformOps philosophy that treats developers as customers while meeting their organization’s policies. VMware understands this transition building on 20 years of stewarding the most popular Java framework, Spring, which fundamentally changed the enterprise Java landscape on the back of a superior developer experience. That history allows us to identify patterns and attributes that we believe are critical to delivering a better cloud native developer experience on Kubernetes.

In this talk we’ll focus on three things PlatformOps teams should focus on:

Reducing complexity without sacrificing flexibility
Shifting outcomes left without shifting the burden left
Ensuring consistency and security without giving up agility

Join Ben Hale, VMware Senior Staff Engineer and Technical Lead for VMware Tanzu® developer experience, as he shares the core values of a great developer experience on Kubernetes based on his multi-decade career building application development tools and working with one of today’s most thriving open source developer communities, Spring.

A

Good morning, everybody uh I'm glad to be here at kubecon to talk to you um as a representative of vmware. um I work on a project called the tonzu application platform and it's our you know, sort of uh platform on top of kubernetes as a platform really oriented towards application developers.

A

Now uh I'll start by saying at vmware operations teams are really important to us right. It's in our dna. Everybody knows who vmware is and because we have this, you know real close connection to the operations community. We've been really close partners as that that group those groups have on undergone a transformation.

A

So we've always had you know sort of in the past this. This relationship, where you have your delivery teams, uh people who are writing your business logic, delivering applications right and the way they interacted with their operations team was to basically throw some code over the wall.

A

The operations team was responsible for care and feeding of all of these kinds of things, whether it was a middleware, whether it was the operating system and the things that went along with that, but with the rise of new technologies, specifically containers and kubernetes, the need for middleware and specifically middleware managed by another team, has really decreased right.

A

So now all of a sudden developers are responsible for that, but by taking on that responsibility, they've also sort of gone through an expectational change. They have this expectation now that what they want is a self-service platform. They want to do more of this work themselves rather than having to deal with an operations team, but that means that the operations teams are also off making the same kind of transitions.

A

They need to make a self-service platform and probably for the first time and and the way many of them think they have customers that they need to make happy right. It's no longer hey somebody's just going to throw something to me. It's hey people want to use my platform. How can I do that? For them? How can I have a product? That's really good, and this is where I personally come in my history- is I've worked on. You know application development frameworks for more than 20 years.

A

In fact, the reason I'm here at vmware is because I came along with the spring acquisition right. Vmware is the steward of one of the most important software development frameworks. So we really have a good look at both sides: hey here's! What an operation team wants to build for their customers and here's what their customers are expecting them to build for them, and so along those lines.

A

I have three things that if you are building one of these kinds of platforms, you should keep in mind that your application developers are thinking of number one reduce complexity without sacrificing flexibility, as everybody else above me or before me has said, hey look. This looks complex. I personally like the line right at the top, where it says overwhelmed with a question mark as if somebody doesn't think this is overwhelming um a lot of teams when they attempt to sort of boil this down for their customers pick a very thick set of things right.

A

You must use flux and build packs and gripe and kubernetes. That's our stack, um but you have to remember that all of your teams want a little bit of flexibility. Maybe they don't want to use flux, they want to use argo. Maybe they want to use conoco, maybe they want to use trivia or sneak instead, and maybe they want to deploy into k-native. All of these things still need to be there right.

A

Customers don't want the full map, but they wouldn't mind a smaller selection instead number two, when you think about the shift left, movement and and sort of the devsec ops world, um we started. You know in the the sort of the old days, I'm obviously a java person from way way back. um I remember you know the sort of we do source tests, we throw it over a wall. Occasionally somebody comes back to us and tells me something didn't work or we didn't meet some sort of requirement right.

A

We had these two separate teams that were divided where application developers knew a lot about their language and you had an operations team that was responsible for knowing all of the other technologies that went into it. As we went through this evolution, sort of the first generation of this shift left evolution. You saw a bunch of developers who really recognized the power of the shift left, making sure that they were doing things like signing and scanning and auditing early on.

A

But what ended up happening was you ended up shifting all of the burden of knowing those technologies left as well, and so we need to make sure that, as we deliver these platforms, we still keep that knowledge centralized right in an operations team whose you know sort of bread and butter is what does it mean to scan? What does it mean to?

A

You know, sign images and attest to certain things, but still give the outcome to the developers themselves on the left side, and the final thing is that we need to make sure that we're ensuring the consistency and security our enterprise wants from us. Our organization wants from us, but without giving up the agility that it also wants from us. So all of us have you know at some point seen uh an internal footprint that looks a lot like this java developing or landing on kubernetes uh go landing on k native, maybe you're.

A

You know really exotic. You got some python going on to flink again what you end up seeing is hey. My enterprise really wants to ensure we've gone through a robust set of tests and we've done some test scanning, and but they often go a little bit too far and say hey. You also are going to have to use this input language and deliver onto this platform.

A

So when you're building a platform, you need to make sure that you identify clearly what's important right. What the key things are, the testing and the scanning bit of it, while allowing the flexibility at the end points right what languages you're going to program in what platforms you're going to deliver on to or what runtimes you're going to deliver into, so that you still get the agility that the business needs, while focusing on what its requirements are.

A

So if you can sort of keep those three ideas in mind, um I think you're well on your way towards building a successful platform that your application developers, users will love. Thank you for your time.