Driving Developer Experience with Kubernetes Operators

Hi everyone,

SQUER and Cloud Native Computing Vienna (yes, yes, we could have used the abbreviation "cncv") are happy to announce a new meetup with special guest REWE. We will talk about the core IT competency "automation" meeting the core cloud native computing competency "Kubernetes": Kubernetes Operators.

This is a hybrid event. Register for the live-stream at https://community.cncf.io/e/mpfwzd/

Agenda

17:00 Welcome
17:15 Open News
17:30 TALK: Driving Developer Experience with Kubernetes Operators

Content

Anything not automated is slowing us down. Anything automated but too hard to manage, either. Especially the latter circumstance prevents many development teams nowadays from managing and setting up workloads smoothly and quickly. Since neither the maintenance of colossal YAMLs is fun and efficient, nor does inexorably growing logic in Kustomize and Helm templates unleash joy to the given developer experience.

The Operator Pattern is a meaningful way to overcome these downsides. But before we dive into the details of this concept, we will start by unpacking the pros and cons of the different IaC and GitOps tools we saw over the past years. This foundation will allow us to understand better the concept of operators and how carefully extending the Kubernetes-API custom Resources helped us boost the developer experience at REWE to an elusive new level. We will further see hands-on demonstrations of the best practices, patterns, and tools that help us develop them efficiently. This will give us an insight into leveraging the Operator Framework or how we can even utilize the Operator pattern for nonclustered resources.

Upon a closer look at the advantages and challenges we've experienced, it turns out that crafting well-defined APIs, acting as the entry point to manage our workloads, can be a game-changing way to build cloud-native platforms — but are not a silver bullet either. This talk will give you the knowledge to decide if it's the right tool for your job.

Speaker

Martin Fuchsluger is Technology Lead in the Integration platform at REWE, aiming to enable teams to integrate their systems across the whole organisation easily, with the overarching goal to give REWE customers a full end-2-end digitalized experience.

David Leitner (@duffleit) is Coding Architect at SQUER, a Viennese Software Company, working with different stacks and environments, but always an overarching mission: connect ideas and provide impact — with technology.

Special Shoutout to Lena Schön providing all the graphics and to Sarah Schraml for organizing.