Ramiro Berrelleza, Okteto | KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023

This is texturing TV. Hey folks, welcome back to kubecon plus Cloud nativecon Europe. I'm Mike vizard, and I'm here with Ramiro paralezza from oketo, and we're talking about developer experience in the kubernetes environments Ramiro.

Welcome the show. Thanks by having here. Great.

Good. Talk to you. People have been talking about the suboptimal developer experience and kubernetes environments for some time.

Now, is that finally getting better? Because it seems like that particular issue has been holding up development of applications, especially Cloud native applications because not as many developers could our building app says can you can hope for I think there's maybe seven million building on kubernetes and out of a population of 50 million. So do we got to get better at this whole developer experience a spot on?

Yes. We are. That's one of the reasons why I started having a cloud native developer for many years and I was always something that frustrated me a lot.

So it's great to see, you know, Canada, but many other companies very focused on this and what's even more exciting to me is that now we're seeing this large companies investing and creating teams and budgets around experience because they recognize that that's something you need to invest on to get better at so when I look back like four years ago, Military company to today there's great progress It's always things to do more but it's getting better. You know Q connector kubefcon. All these things are getting much better.

It's easier more inclusive we have work to do, but I'm very excited for where things are and where we're going. You mentioned that there's a lot more work on developer experience mean we've been treating developers shabby for years. Why now?

Why are we can what's driving this change? So one thing you mentioned that thing is driving. This change is there's a lot more developers than before.

I think we're seeing this really instant transition of sovereign engineering being something that was kind of a niche and now it's something that pretty much every company in the world needs like to our company we talk to everything from traditional Enterprises startups governments, so everybody has over Engineers, so now Like anything else when you have a resource you want to make sure you're using it as as good as possible and that's where that experience I think also kubernetes came. It is solving a lot of issues but also created some some complexities that we're now trying to figure out and and that's what that experiences is becoming a topic. I think it's it's not just on kubernetes like everywhere else front and back and other types of development, but I do believe that particularly for cloud native because such a broad ecosystem.

We need a strong focus on that experience. One of the issues that keeps coming up over and over again is that we want to shift left theoretically and developers are supposed to manage the platform as part of that. I've talked to very few developers that are excited about managing kubernetes.

So what is the swim Lane? What is the right separation of concern here? That's a really good question because for the longest time we were just shifting left everything and I think that Well, maybe overdid it.

So I think one of the things that I talked a lot about is how it is important to shift left, but it's also important to reduce the cognitive load that the developers need to deal with like you want developers to be able to be good at what they do and not have to be experts on everything. So that's where I feel like a lot of us are now talking about building platforms as a way to reduce what developers need to know and let them focus on business value and not have, you know, a hundred people in a company being experts in kubernetes and instead have 10. We're really good at it and the other 90 be good at whatever your company is doing whether it's banking software Logistics.

Or size Etc. We seem to be living between two extremes and the one hand people have been, you know, dealing with passes forever and a day but they're highly opinionated and they're and everybody wants to have their little tool tweak and then kind of defeats the purpose of the past on the other end. We see organizations that have built some custom thing from scratch that they're hoping that the organization will standardize the software Engineers love it and the developers are kind of indifferent.

So is there some way to kind of have a middle ground where you know, I can have the benefits of something that's opinionated, but that's flexible and extensible. And is that where we're trying to get to? I I agree completely.

I always call this guy like the Goldilocks effect where things are too hot to cut I think so one of the things that I've always been very excited about with kubernetes is because it became kind of this the factor a standard for all things Cloud native. Now we have a basement we can all work together on so people are building paths people are building more open platforms. But because we're all speaking this kubernetes language, that means all of our platforms are extensible by default and we see that a lot.

We're some of our users we have an open source tool as well some of our contributors They come with like some some like the very heavy-handed draw the square others prefer a more open and kubernetes really allows you to build. opinionated passes, but with this Escape valves to build like more flexibility, which I think is getting us closer to that Ideal World of you have a platform that gives you 80% but do have the sensibility to build the other 20% when needed how automatic can all this get we see people talking about generative Ai and coding and stuff like that. Is that going to be commonplace for everywhere we go, I mean and you know, will it write code or will it just kind of type ahead?

That's a good question. I hope so. I think that like one Technologies.

Ai and platforms and all this things are gonna help us be more effective. So I I I'm hoping for a future where we don't we no longer have to write the scaffolding code the basic things so that we can get out of the way and we can use you know, what humans are good at which is innovating solving heart problems and let Ai and all these other Solutions help us with the long tail of work that needs to be done. Is now shall we say fashionable?

And we are starting to see more applications being developed as a result. But I'm also starting to hear from folks who are saying a lot of applications are being built for kubernetes that are not really well suited for kubernetes and they're not fit for purpose. So do we need to look twice before we jump here and figure out exactly what types of applications lend themselves to this particular platform.

I think so like any other technology we all go through a phase where like this one thing looks super exciting and we want to do everything there. It happened before with cloud computing. It happened before with beautiful station.

I think it's important when we're adopting technology to look at it. But I think it's also important to understand that kubernetes is really about orchestrating resources. So as long as you need scale as long as you need infrastructure provision fast, it's a great fit.

Like I think I'm also looking forward to the what the time where kubernetes becomes boring and it's just this layer that you just know it's there because that's what when's Gonna Shine when it's you know, it's invisible it gives you value but he doesn't get in the way and and we're getting there. There's a lot of like effort been done in like making it more stand there easier to use more reliable and once we get there, I think everybody should just be able to run pretty much any workload on kubernetes and not think about it. So at the show you guys announced integration with AWS and I'm what was involved in that?

Why should people care and you know because it's all kubernetes right right should run anywhere magically and it does and and that was our vision we started but as we you know, as we acquire customers as we talked to more people in the industry we were saying before we realized that not everybody is a hundred percent in kubernetes. Some applications are better suited for having Parts on the cloud Parts on kubernetes. So our Dev experience platform has the ball is to allow you to Define these available environments that include coolness resources, but now also AWS resources in Google Cloud you can use things like terraform and even Things like feature Flags using launched artery mongodb Atlas for search instances.

Our goal here is Define the experience that your team needs don't be constrained by kubernetes or cloud and our tooling will let you Gonna expand to either one of this as you need it so that you know, you have to make sure you have the right tools and we're helping you by giving you experience the automation to provision everything for your developers. All right folks. Well, you heard it here.

I think we're supposed to remember that devops and software Engineers exist to make developers happy. We can we tend to forget that a lot, but maybe we got to go back to the fundamentals from here. Thanks for being on the show.

Thank you very much. Thank you. All right folks.

We'll be back in a minute.