Let’s discuss an extremely common anti-pattern I’ve noticed with teams that are relatively new to containers/cloud-native/Kubernetes, etc. More so than when building traditional monoliths, cloud-native applications can be incredibly complex and, as a result, need a relatively sophisticated development environment. Unfortunately, this need often isn’t evident at the beginning of the cloud-native journey. Development environments are an afterthought – a cumbersome, heavy, brittle drag on productivity.
The best teams treat development environments as a priority and devote significant DevOps/SRE time to perfecting them. In doing so, they end up with development environments that “just work” for every developer, not just those who are experienced with containers and Kubernetes. For these teams, every developer has a fast, easy-to-use development environment that works for every developer every time.