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**Gerhard Lazu:** That is a very good way of putting it, because you're right, some people, including myself - I think "Wow, there's so much choice. This is so confusing." But I'm spoiled. I'm spoiled for choice; there's so many approaches, and there's no one better than the other. It's all contextual. So I'm complaini... |
\[08:10\] So in the Cloud-native Fundamentals, in the course, did you do any of this curation, or how did you pick basically the approach that you follow or that you recommend? |
**Katie Gamanji:** So when I was actually building the course, I really had the audience in mind who is actually gonna take this course. I was trying to make it easier for them to navigate the ecosystem, because as I mentioned, there's a canvas full of different tooling, and you can pick and choose, you can make a grea... |
So when I was trying to choose the tooling, I was trying to make it easier for the students. At the beginning, I was trying to explain that you have an application. The only requirement a student will need is to have some programming experience, because based on an application, we're gonna move it forward to different ... |
So having this application, what do we do with it? We start thinking about its architecture. Is it a good application to be containerized? So we're starting with those mindsets and perspectives around the service. Then we're thinking about "How can we containerize it?" We usually look at Docker. Docker has been there f... |
Kubernetes by itself was one of the focuses, as well. When you're talking cloud-native, there's gonna be an element of container orchestration, hence we talked about Kubernetes resources and how it actually schedules different resources in applications, how it can expose your application to the wide world using Ingress... |
The interesting thing is however when you choose a CI/CD pipeline, because there you have so much choice around the tooling. One thing that I've purposely done - I've split the CI and the CD into two different lessons... Because most of the people cannot really differentiate the stages within a pipeline. When I was try... |
Again, I was trying to put the bare minimum of "How can you have an application package deployed, automate the deployment process, and have it running within a cluster?" I was trying to choose the tools purposely to kind of fit these fundamentals and make it very easy for them to move forward. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay, so you mentioned that you split CI and CD... And based on the tooling that you mentioned, the way I understand it is that you use GitHub Actions as the CI, and Argo as a CD. |
**Katie Gamanji:** Precisely. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay. And why is that? Why did you split CI and CD? That is interesting. |
**Katie Gamanji:** \[12:00\] I wanted to make it very clear what is continuous integration by itself and what is continuous delivery by itself. Because continuous integration usually focuses on the code - how can you actually integrate the latest features from your application within an artifact? So the end of the CI s... |
With the CI you can have, for example, testing in different environments, you can build artifacts for different platforms. However, at the end of it, the result should be an artifact. So I wanted to make that very clear with the cloud-native space that you're just gonna be represented by a Docker file, which will be ab... |
So I kind of separated that... And when it comes to continuous delivery, it's how you actually ship that artifact to different environments. So I wanted to make it clear that a pipeline, in a way, should do continuous integration and continuous delivery, should contain all of these stages, but I don't think there is a ... |
Again, it was not the main focus. I wanted, again, to make it clear, to differentiate it... But if we're looking from a different perspective, we can see this interoperability, we can see this diversity of the tooling. We can easily switch the Argo CD, for example, with Flux. We can use Spinnaker instead; we can use an... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That is really interesting, because even though we don't call it out like that to basically build and deploy Changelog.com the app itself, we do something very similar. We use CircleCI as the CI, where the end result of the pipeline is a container image. So if tests pass, if dependencies get built, we... |
So migrating, in our case, from Circle CI to GitHub Actions is easier than if we had this really huge pipeline that had all sorts of secrets, and it knew where the Kubernetes clusters were running, and it needed access to those... So it definitely works. I can definitely say that it works, and that's why I was trying t... |
**Katie Gamanji:** \[16:06\] Absolutely. Again, here it's just preparing the mindset for -- you actually build your own pipeline. And again, it's more about the internal requirements you have within an organization. If you cannot choose open source tools, then probably you'll need to run your own Jenkins servers, and r... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So I guess this philosophy -- I call it the Unix philosophy, with small utilities, and then combine and compose in infinite ways... Is that what cloud-native is to you? Or is it something else? |
**Katie Gamanji:** I think it becomes that. What actually draws me to cloud-native is the diversity of tooling. And not necessarily the tooling, but the strategies... Because I've been interacting with many organizations, I've been talking with many engineers, and when you're talking about the infrastructure and their ... |
So it really varies, but the interesting part about all of these platforms - they're different, but they leverage open source at the same time, and they try to contribute... I'm kind of amazed, because this small adoption, this small integration builds up to this organic growth of the entire cloud-native ecosystem, and... |
Thinking about Kubernetes - it's been around for seven years; we're actually marking seven years now. But it completely changed the way we have these application deployment strategies. We had the VMs, and this was the buzz thing maybe ten years ago, but within seven years everything just changed completely. And we have... |
And this is the beauty of it, because we can leverage this and build with multiple clouds, and you can migrate applications quite easily using the same abstraction layer. So the beauty of it is it's a pluggable system; it's interoperable. It's diverse and organically growing, and I think this is something which is quit... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** \[19:54\] Yeah. That is a very good answer, and sometimes I think if you take away Kubernetes, what are you left with? So Kubernetes definitely was the center of it all, and many things are being built on top of it and around it... But if you remove it, I think we're starting to see other scheduling p... |
**Katie Gamanji:** If I couldn't use Kubernetes... That's an interesting one; what is life without Kubernetes...? \[laughter\] I've been working with it for so long I'm quite biased here. But I think it really depends on what kind of applications I have here. I'm actually, again, biased from something that I would like... |
Again, it depends on the organization, but something in me would be like "I don't wanna go the data center way again", because I think -- actually, I wouldn't mind this, but I think this is a space which requires a bit of modernization as well, in terms of how we set it up. If the tooling is right, if the mindset is ri... |
So my answer here is - as you mentioned, there is a very good diversity to containers as well, \[unintelligible 00:22:23.01\] But it really depends on what you would like to deploy; based on that, you'd be able to choose maybe some more specific tooling, something which is right. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah. A PaaS - now that you've mentioned, a PaaS may work, for sure... Because you're right, I know there are many efforts to abstract Kubernetes away. It's an implementation detail, as the load balancers - we used to configure them, and now they're just an implementation detail; it's just an Ingress.... |
So that is really interesting, because I think, again, going back to the choice comment - I think we're really spoiled for choice these days... And then if you're trying to cling on to your bare metal machines - that's okay, there's nothing wrong with that, but I don't think people can be as exclusivist anymore. It's n... |
**Break:** \[23:52\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Imagine, Katie, that this is your first day in a new job. You're leading a team of five or seven developers; you're the lead developer here, and also you have a bit of an architect role... And the brief is to design an online presence, an online store for a supermarket that needs to service mobile app... |
**Katie Gamanji:** Well, it depends in which stage we are of building that store... Because having a first MVP I think is more important than having the full architecture grounded down to every single service that is gonna be covered within this store. |
So at the beginning, the first MVP - what is actually a store? Of course, we're gonna have a web interface. This is what the customers will interact with. We're gonna have a database, which is gonna be pretty much storing all of our items that we'd like to sell. We're gonna have a backend which pretty much will connect... |
So these are kind of the three "major" things - usually, the frontend the backend, and then you have a database component as well. This is gonna be the bare minimum. But the fun part starts when the backend actually is not just about getting a request and providing a response back, it's about maybe expanding to differe... |
So when thinking about a store, we have a shopping cart, we can have, for example, different currencies we'd like our price to be displayed. You might have different languages, we have different categories, maybe we have even different portals for different stores which are managed by the same company. One is gonna be ... |
But starting with -- I think -- is have the first MVP. You don't need to segregate everything across three repositories and have everything nailed down on an architectural level. Have it working - a basic frontend, a basic backend, and a database running maybe even locally, and that's it. This is gonna be the monolithi... |
\[28:12\] For example, if the shopping cart is not working, if that functionality specifically is not working, everything else on the store is still working; people will be able to visualize, maybe they will still be able to get an order confirmation, or do the payment and so forth... |
So you really want to segregate things. You really want to reduce the blast area if something goes wrong. And this is where usually the answer is -- "Are microservices good for me at this stage?" the answer is gonna be yes. But again, you have to think "How would you like to split those services?" We've been talking ab... |
The other thing that I want to mention here is that once you have a set of microservices, that is not the end. You always should consider and make sure that you reiterate on your application, on your codebases... Because if for example you've written one microservice using Java, because that was the main resource knowl... |
For example, Java is gonna be very heavy on the CPU consumption. And then you realize you're looking to your machines and you would like to save some of that compute... And you're thinking "Is it the right time to rewrite this microservice using a different language?" Actually, there is a capstone project where student... |
Having these maybe different languages and segregation of services allows you to have independent management of these applications, as long as you have a very well-documented API and you know how different products should call each other, you have a standard; you will be able to pretty much have this independent develo... |
One thing that I wanted to mention as well - I've started to talk about this - you have to reiterate. Something you've been segregating in different microservices can be too granular, so you might think of maybe putting some of the currency and payment microservices. If you find this too granular, there's too much mana... |
Some of these services are completely staled, so for example you've developed a very - I don't know, maybe a very personalized shopping cart experience that no one is using, that's one of the microservices that is not used; you might be marking it as stale and completely retire it from your cluster and from your applic... |
What I'm trying to say for all of these operations and microservices - it's dynamic. It's not set in stone. So you have an application, you might split it in microservices, but that's not the end. You always have to reiterate and consider what is the best for your application team, for your business and for your organi... |
So it's a journey, but again, one thing that I want to mention here - do try to understand the requirements of your organization. Everything is gonna be driven by those. So if you're an organization that really wants to scale up, and they have all of the resources in the world, maybe you're not gonna think about optimi... |
\[32:01\] For you, the primary thing is gonna be be available out there; you have enough scale, you have enough resource, so cost optimization is not gonna be something you're gonna look at very frequently. However, for an organization which is in a startup, they will be trying to use all of the free level tiers resour... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** What I'm hearing is "It depends." |
**Katie Gamanji:** Yes. \[laughs\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** It depends on your context, always. |
**Katie Gamanji:** The short answer, yes. |
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