Making Self-Service Clusters Ready for DevOps Adoption

November 22, 2022

An Intellyx BrainBlog for Loft Labs

History is littered with cautionary tales of software delivery tools that were technically ahead of their time, yet were ultimately unsuccessful because of a lack of end user adoption.

In the past, the success of developer tooling vendors depended upon the rise and fall of the major competitive platforms around them. An upstart vendor could still break through to grab market share from dominant players in a space by delivering a superior user experience (or UX) and partnering with a leader, until such time as they were acquired.

A great UX generally includes an intuitive UI design based on human factors, especially important in consumer-facing applications. Human factors are still important in software development tooling, however, the UX focus is on whether the tools will readily deliver value to the organization, by empowering developers to efficiently deliver better software.

Kubernetes (or k8s) arose from the open source foundations of Linux, containerization, and a contributed project from Google. A global community of contributors turned the enterprise space inside out, by abstracting away the details of deploying and managing infrastructure as code.

Finally, development and operations teams could freely download non-proprietary tooling and orchestrate highly scalable cloud native software architecture. So what was holding early K8s adopters back from widespread use in their DevOps lifecycles?

The challenge: empowering developers

A core tenet of the DevOps movement is self-service automation. Key stakeholders should be fully empowered to collaborate freely with access to the tools and resources they need.

Instead of provisioning through the approval process of an IT administrative control board, DevOps encourages the establishment of an agile platform team (in smaller companies, this may be one platform manager). The platform team should provide developers with a self-service stack of approved on-demand tooling and environments, without requesting an exhaustive procurement process or ITIL review cycles.

At first glance, Kubernetes, with its declarative abstraction of infrastructure, seems like a perfect fit for orchestrating these environments. But much like an early sci-fi spaceship where wires are left hanging behind the lights of control panels, many specifics of integration, data movement, networking and security were intentionally left up to the open source community to build out, rather than locking in design assumptions in these key areas.

Because the creation and configuration of Kubernetes clusters comes with a unique set of difficulties, the platform team may try to reduce rework by offering a one-size-fits-all approach. Sometimes, this may not meet the needs of all developers, and may exceed the needs of other teams with excess allocation and cloud cost.

You can easily tell if an organization’s DevOps initiative is off track — if it simply shifts the provisioning bottleneck from the IT Ops team’s responsibility to a new DevOps platform team that is backlogged and struggling to deploy k8s clusters for the right people at the correct specifications.

Handing over the keys

The ability to usurp the limitations of physical networks and IP addressing is the secret weapon of Kubernetes. With configuration defined as code, teams can call for namespaces and clusters that truly fit the semantics and dimensions of the application.

The inherent flexibility of k8s produces an additional set of concerns around role-based access controls (RBAC) that must be solved in order to scale without undue risk…