Developer Workflow Trail for Cloud Native Applications (Request for Feedback)
As part of my work with Datawire, I’ve been working with the team around the idea of defining an effective developer workflow when building “cloud native” applications. I shared our initial discussions in a TheNewStack article “Kubernetes and PaaS: The Force of Developer Experience and Workflow”, and this article is a request for feedback on our attempts to expand on this.
For the majority of organisations (at least those looking to embrace cloud native principles) the keys to competitive advantage are speed and stability. These aren’t just my thoughts, I’m standing on the shoulders of giants such as Adrian Cockcroft and Steve Smith. Just this morning I opened up Twitter and saw a great tweet from Fintan Ryan of Redmonk, echoing the same concepts from his recent experiences at the Cloud Foundry Summit.
Fintan mentions about “developer velocity”, which is a key part of the developer experience, and runs the gamut from developers being aligned with business goals, to having appropriate tooling and processes from build to operations.
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s (CNCF) Cloud Native Trail Map is a good attempt to describe the steps an engineering team may take when exploring cloud native technologies, although it is rather infrastructure (and hence, operations) focused.
I’ve tried to capture some of my learnings of the steps an organisation typically takes when embracing cloud native principles like microservices, public cloud and containers, and have placed this in a publicly accessible Google doc (with comments open) titled “Developer Workflow Trail for Cloud Native Applications”:
Please do let me know what you think in the Google doc! I plan to make this look at little nicer in the future, but at the moment it would be good to here whether you think this makes sense, or whether your experiences have been vastly different!
