In part one of this two-part series, DevOps.com introduced the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), a nonprofit organization with 49 members engaged in promoting the development of cloud native applications. Let’s continue with the CNCF’s thoughts on instilling a DevOps culture.
DevOps.com: Why do developers need the freedom to choose how they build software? What kinds and levels of freedom? Is this about approaches, development tools or something else?
Brian Grant: All of the above: approaches, tools, languages … Different solutions work better for different workloads, scenarios, environments and people. Even new applications developed from scratch to be cloud-native aren’t typically developed in a vacuum—their developers may be familiar with particular languages or tools, the new application may need to interact with legacy applications; it may need to be built with and/or deployed onto existing infrastructure, etc. Often developers need to be able to adopt new technologies or approaches incrementally.
DevOps.com: How do you recommend providing this freedom to developers? How do you help provide it?
Grant: Containers provide an ideal mechanism for providing this freedom, since they can be used to deploy both new and legacy applications, written in any language, built by any tool, into any environment. It’s a goal of the CNCF to foster an ecosystem of composable technologies, such as Kubernetes that facilitate the management of container-packaged applications.
DevOps.com: How does this align with instilling a DevOps culture?
Grant: Because containers are small and fast, one application can be packed in each container image. Consequently, immutable container images can be created at build/release time rather than deployment time, since each application doesn’t need to be composed with the rest of the application stack nor integrated into the production infrastructure environment. This empowers developers to deliver deployable artifacts to operations.
DevOps.com: How is code reuse a need of the developer?
Craig McLuckie: The vast majority of the actual code that is run in any given deployment is written by others. Only a tiny fraction of code in any given instance is actually written by the developer. The rest is everything from common libraries, to full OSS subsystems, to commercial software that systems, to adjacent software projects that provide some business functions. Developers need a common way to integrate with existing systems (when it makes sense) or to find and reuse existing code in a way that is controlled and operations-friendly.
DevOps.com: How do you recommend giving developers the ability to reuse code? How does your organization help with this?
McLuckie: CNCF stands behind two technologies that are critical to code reuse. The first is the use of containers, which represent an intrinsically easy and predictable way to reuse even a relatively complex piece of software. The second is microservices-based architecture that make it easy to wire together systems and reuse existing services versus having to build their own.
DevOps.com: How does this align with instilling a DevOps culture?
McLuckie: Containers make operations far more predictable and reduce possible avenues of error when deploying and updating systems. Rather than run potentially error prone imperative configuration systems to reuse code, containers are simple, lightweight and predictable, and reduce the potential for errors.
Microservices allow for better operations specialization and create systems that are more intrinsically agile and easy to evolve. They allow for smaller teams that are focused on delivering a specific function versus having to align around large system boundaries. This creates a more productive and operationally viable environment.
DevOps.com: What is cloud-native? What does that mean?
McLuckie: For CNCF, ‘cloud native’ is about a new pattern of application development that was pioneered by the internet companies, but that is equally applicable to developers and operators running more traditional workloads.
We see three common attributes that make systems ‘cloud-native’:
Container-packaged: Applications and processes are run in software containers as a unit of application deployment, which facilitates reproducibility, transparency and resource isolation. This improves overall developer experience, fosters code and component reuse, and simplifies operations.
Dynamically managed: Applications are actively scheduled and managed. This radically improves machine efficiency and resource utilization while reducing the costs associated with maintenance and operations.
Microservices-oriented: Applications are loosely coupled, with dependencies explicitly specified. This significantly increases the overall agility and maintainability of applications.
Together, these three capabilities allow developers to build systems that are intrinsically agile and scale well. They significantly reduce the operational complexity of running an application, allowing operators to be more focused on application-level concerns and relying heavily on smart systems to do the operations heavy lifting.
