Speaker

Over the last 2 years cloud-based integrated development environments (IDEs) such as Gitpod or GitHub Codespaces have gained a lot of popularity. Devpod is the most recent Open Source technology in this field and there will very likely be more additions in the near future.

With this talk I compare and contrast the features of these technologies opposed to traditional ones and highlight how container technology serves as the base technology to make this happen. This includes the devcontainer specification.

Furthermore, I will explore the advances made in this field and discuss the limitations that still exist.

I will demonstrate the ease and efficiency for developing polyglot, container-based distributed applications. The live demo will show how a developer can start coding away in seconds without the need to set up any build environment for a magnitude of predefined programming languages and frameworks. This includes immediate showcasing of the development results, testing ability and deployment to external Kubernetes environments.

Moreover, I will discuss how cloud IDEs have helped me in teaching distributed systems at university, by ensuring that all my students have a consistent development setup. This will also showcase how these environments can be used to standardize development environments in team projects, making the development process more efficient and streamlined.

In today's modern software landscape - in the cloud-native one in particular - observability has become a critical aspect of ensuring the performance, reliability, and security of applications. OpenTelemetry, a standard and open-source observability framework, provides a unified way to collect and export telemetry data from applications and services. This hands-on lab will guide participants through the process of using OpenTelemetry to instrument a simple application, collect metrics, traces, and logs, and send them to various backends for analysis.

The lab covers the implementation and usage of OpenTelemetry into Python and Java-based application. Each participant will get a dedicated environment.

The exercise include

• the instrumentation of a polyglot microservice application
• auto-instrumentation vs. manual instrumentation
• evaluating the collected traces, logs and metrics
• configuring a collector
• analysing the results in Jaeger

This lab is made for developers seeking a pragmatic understanding of OpenTelemetry's immediate benefits. Walk away with practical skills that can be implemented right away in your projects, and elevate your observability game in just 90 minutes.

Do you know how to…

…wait for a Pod to be Running, or for a Deployment to be Available?

…"turn off and on again" a Deployment?  

…connect to a Service in a different Namespace when the client is hardcoded to connect to "db"?

… generate a YAML manifest without copy-pasting it from the docs or ChatGPT?

… switch between namespaces (or even clusters!) super quickly?

… get an image with (almost) any tool you need without having to write and build a Dockerfile?

If you answered "no" to any of these questions, then this talk is for you, since you'll see how to do all these things (and a few more). You're invited to a parade of tips, tricks, and techniques, to improve your productivity and reduce your frustration with Kubernetes!