March 2020 Summaries

Enabling Full Cycle Development: 4 Cloud Native Platform Capabilities involves providing a platform that supports self-service functionality, container management, progressive delivery, edge management, and observability. This enables full cycle developers to run through the entire SDLC independently with speed and confidence, becoming more customer-focused and delivering verifiable value to end-users. Platform teams must remove friction from packaging applications into containers, enabling observation of system behavior, and assisting organizations in understanding and meeting security requirements. The four core cloud platform capabilities are container management, progressive delivery, edge management, and observability management, which require careful consideration to avoid common antipatterns such as centralized design and ownership, fragmented platform implementation, slow development loops, and inefficient outer development loops. By designing and building an effective platform, organizations can support the teams and workflow, leveraging technology like Kubernetes to achieve this goal.

The talk discusses the evolution and development of Ambassador, an edge proxy built on Kubernetes and Envoy. It highlights five distinct phases in Ambassador's life - experimentation, turning it into a real product, adding features, the Grand Refactor phase, and the present balancing act. The speaker emphasizes the importance of user feedback and interaction during the experimentation phase, which led to crucial learnings that shaped the product. They also discuss the challenges faced in handling TLS at the edge and how they evolved their approach over time. Lastly, the talk touches upon future developments and improvements planned for Ambassador.

The adoption of cloud native technologies such as microservices, cloud computing, and DevOps has enabled organizations to respond quickly to market changes. Companies like Spotify, Netflix, and Google have successfully implemented these practices, leading to rapid innovation and growth. Key benefits include minimizing the lead time from idea generation to delivering value to customers, breaking down barriers between development and operations teams, and enabling full cycle development where developers take ownership of the entire process from coding to deployment. Embracing cloud native technologies requires organizational, cultural, and technical shifts, including upskilling within both development and operations teams.