Development

Make your Developers Happy with Rancher and Shipa

Cloud-native 1.0: Infrastructure Challenges

At this point, it’s fair to say that containers and Kubernetes changed the dynamics of infrastructure and platforms. It’s no secret that even though managing Kubernetes clusters is still somewhat complex, in the early days, it was even harder, which is when we saw solutions such as Rancher come up to help us address those challenges.

You will inevitably run into cluster-related challenges when adopting Kubernetes. Rancher became a key component of the stack for many organizations since it helps streamline cluster deployment, monitoring, and management across different infrastructure and clouds.

Now that we feel somewhat comfortable managing multiple clusters across different infrastructure and cloud providers with Rancher, it is time to give our developers access to these clusters to start deploying and managing their applications.

That’s the point where many DevOps teams will then face the second phase of their Kubernetes adoption challenges, the pushback from developers from having Kubernetes as their direct interface for developing and managing their applications.

Signs of Phase 2

Kubernetes is not hard, and every developer should learn it. They should build their manifests, charts and be able to support their applications and the numerous objects created by their applications.Some DevOps

While we encourage people to learn, we can all agree that we all have a job to be done and that adding infrastructure-related complexity in the application deployment and management process can get in the way of the job to be done by the development team, impacting performance, productivity, and more. 

Side note: Most folks who agree with the quote above do not spend their weekend learning Java, Rust, Go, NodeJS, or other programming languages to help developers develop, deploy, and troubleshoot their application code. They are already busy with managing infrastructure, which is fair since we all have our jobs to be done 

With this new challenge, it becomes clear that we are now in the second phase of cloud-native adoption, and in this phase, we need to address the application layer. And that’s where Shipa comes in.

Cloud-Native 2.0: Infrastructure and Application

By integrating directly into the clusters you create with Rancher, Shipa implements an application layer that will enable you to quickly deliver value to your developers where they will be able to focus back on their applications rather than on infrastructure or Kubernetes. 

When you implement an application layer with Shipa, it detaches the developer from the underlying infrastructure. You are then free to select and change underlying components, such as the cluster version, ingress controller, cloud provider, and more, without impacting the developer productivity and experience.

Evolving to this second phase of the cloud-native adoption in your organization will give you control of your infrastructure while empowering your development teams to focus on their jobs to be done, making the DevOps or Platform Engineering team an enabler in the organization. You will be able to address infrastructure requirements while increasing developer productivity and finally realize the benefits of a cloud-native architecture.

See it in action

Do you want to see in practice how Rancher and Shipa can help you enable that phase 2 of your cloud-native and Kubernetes adoption? Then check out the video below: