In this podcast, Daniel Bryant sat down with Bryan Liles, senior staff engineer at VMware. Topics covered included: the challenges with deploying applications into Kubernetes, using the open source Octant tool to increase a user’s understanding of Kubernetes clusters, and how “serverless” technologies may influence the future approaches to building software.

Why listen to this podcast:

 - Octant is a highly extensible platform for developers to better understand the complexity of Kubernetes clusters. Octant runs locally, using the local Kubernetes credentials. It currently displays information about a Kubernetes cluster and related applications as a web page. Soon this tool and resulting display will be provided as a standalone application.
 - The goal of Octant is to enable users to discover what they need to discover. The tool aims to provide context relevant to where a user is and what they are trying to achieve. The Octant plugin system allows integration with other tooling, such as logging and metrics frameworks. This aims to facilitate quick problem detection and resolution.
 - Cloud native platforms like Kubernetes are complicated, as there are lots of moving parts. The most important challenge to be tackled to increase the adoption of platforms like Kubernetes is “how do we move code from our IDEs to wherever it needs to run with the least amount of friction?”. Testing needs to be implicit, as does security verification, and the acts of deployment. Kubernetes needs its “Ruby on Rails” moment.
 - Creating “serverless” systems is an interesting approach, but we may currently be using this technology in a non-optimal way. For example, creating web applications using this technology enables scalability, but can lead to the creation of difficult to understand systems that also require a lot of boilerplate configuration. Arguably, a more interesting use case is implementing large-scale batch processing using simple event-driven models.
- The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has created a series of communities of practice called Special Interest Groups (SIGs), such as SIG App Delivery. This allows folks with similar interests to work together as a community, focusing on solving a specific set of well-scoped problems. There are many ways to get involved, from discussions, to coding and creating documentation.

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InfoQ Podcast

Show Notes

Bryan Liles on Making Kubernetes Easier for Developers, the CNCF, and “Serverless”

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