In this podcast, Daniel Bryant sat down with Dave Sudia, senior DevOps engineer at GoSpotCheck. Topics discussed included: the benefits of PaaS; building a platform with Kubernetes as the foundation; selecting open source components and open standards in order to facilitate the evolution of a platform; and why care should be taken to prioritize the developer experience and create self-service operation of the platform.

Why listen to this podcast: 

 - When starting a business and searching for product-market fit, creating an application using a monolithic code base deployed onto a commercial Platform as a Service (PaaS) product is a very effective way of iterating fast and minimising operational costs.
 - There may come a point where the PaaS cannot provide bespoke requirements, or it has trouble scaling, or the costs become prohibitive. At this point many teams choose to build a custom platform using cloud technologies, such as Kubernetes. 
 - Building a Kubernetes platform can be an effective solution, but appropriate effort needs to be put into designing, building, and maintaining the platform. The platform effectively becomes another product within the business that must be managed accordingly.
 - Embracing open standards provides many benefits, especially for the long term. Implementations that are consumed through well-defined interfaces and abstraction can be more readily swapped at a later point in time. It is also generally easier to integrate components that share common interfaces.
 - Attention and resources must be provided to create an effective developer experience for the platform. It is essential to prioritize self-service operations, and also to understand the core requirements of the engineers and QA specialists that will be using the platform during their daily work.
 - Establishing an effective continuous delivery pipeline can enable more repeatable and scalable testing of applications, and also allows the codification of cross-functional requirements.
 - The cloud native landscape has now evolved to a point where most of the frameworks and tooling required to build a platform have become viable for general purpose usage. However, some assembly may still be required, and engineers should be prepared for change, as the ecosystem moves fast.

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InfoQ Podcast

Show Notes

Dave Sudia on Migrating From a PaaS to a Kubernetes-Based Platform

Software engineers, architects and team leads have found inspiration to drive change and innovation in their team by listening to the weekly InfoQ Podcast. They have received essential information that helped them validate their software development map. We have achieved that by interviewing some of the top CTOs, engineers and technology directors from companies like Uber, Netflix and more. Over 1,200,000 downloads in the last 3 years.

Software developers, platform engineers, and sysadmin/operators listen to the biweekly Ambassador podcasts in order to learn how to build cloud platforms and create an effective developer experience (DevEx) for deploying container-based applications to Kubernetes. We also discuss best practices for releasing functionality via continuous delivery pipelines, and we investigate the latest developer tooling, API gateway technology (e.g Envoy), and service mesh implementations. We interview practitioners and senior technical leaders from organizations such as HashiCorp, Lyft, TicketMaster, Headstart, and Buoyant.