Developer Experience on Kubernetes (Cloud Native Aalborg 2025)

As a developer, working with Kubernetes too often leads to too much cognitive load, inefficient inner development loops, and friction in the path to production.
This session is structured as a series of iterations on the developer experience to improve those three aspects and boost productivity, while following an approach based on open-source technologies.

1. Thomas Vitale Cloud Native Aalborg February 2025 Developer Experience On Kubernetes @thomasvitale.com
2. Problem @thomasvitale.com
3. Value @thomasvitale.com
4. Systematic Thomas Vitale @thomasvitale.com
5. Developer Experience @thomasvitale.com
6. Developer Experience “…developer experience could be defined as a means for capturing how developers think and feel about their activities within their working environments, with the assumption that an improvement of the developer experience has positive impacts on characteristics such as sustained team and project performance.” (F. Fagerholm, J. Münch) Developer Experience: Concept and De fi nition (F. Fagerholm, J. Münch) @thomasvitale.com
7. Developer Experience: Concept and De fi nition (F. Fagerholm, J. Münch) Developer Experience Conceptual Framework @thomasvitale.com
8. Developer Experience Tools are not enough ORGANIZATION PROCESSES TECHNOLOGY CULTURE @thomasvitale.com
9. Team Topologies Organisational design for software @thomasvitale.com
10. Continuous Delivery Better software faster @thomasvitale.com
11. Inner Loop @thomasvitale.com
12. Development Containers Dev Environment in a Box @thomasvitale.com
13. Development Containers Dev Environment in a Box GitHub Codespaces VS Code IntelliJ Gateway DevPod @thomasvitale.com
14. Runtime (Language) Application (Executable) Cloud Native Applications @thomasvitale.com
15. Moving to Containers Runtime (Language) Application (Executable) Runtime (OCI) Application (Container) @thomasvitale.com
16. “Friends don’t let friends write Dockerfiles!” - Josh Long @thomasvitale.com
17. Image pack build Cloud Native Buildpacks From source code to container image Cloud Native Buildpacks https://buildpacks.io @thomasvitale.com
18. Image pack build gradle bootBuildImage Cloud Native Buildpacks From source code to container image Cloud Native Buildpacks https://buildpacks.io @thomasvitale.com
19. Eliminate sources of non-determinism Reproducible builds with Cloud Native Buildpacks Cloud Native Buildpacks https://buildpacks.io Image pack build Image pack build Time = = @thomasvitale.com
20. Moving to Kubernetes Runtime (Language) Application (Executable) Runtime (OCI) Application (Container) Runtime (OCI) Middleware (Kubernetes) Application (Container) @thomasvitale.com
21. Working with Kubernetes Manifests for application deployment Deployment Deploy the application and con fi gure replication Service Expose the application from within the cluster Ingress Expose the application from outside the cluster @thomasvitale.com
22. Kubernetes for Local Development? @thomasvitale.com
23. Continuous Development Code, Run, Test, Debug Development Workflow gradle bootRun flask --debug run yarn dev Dev & Test Services @thomasvitale.com
24. @thomasvitale.com
25. Outer Loop @thomasvitale.com
26. Knative Serverless experience on Kubernetes @thomasvitale.com
27. Serverless Architectures Developers focus on code Focus on business logic Developer Platform Infrastructure Provisioning Workload Management Dynamic Scaling @thomasvitale.com
28. Knative Serving Serverless Experience on Kubernetes Developer-friendly abstractions From image to URL Autoscaling Scaling to zero Progressive Rollouts Request-driven Event-driven Cloud agnostic @thomasvitale.com
29. Tilt Continuous development on Kubernetes CODE BUILD RUN TEST Inner Development Loop @thomasvitale.com
30. Capabilities over responsibilities @thomasvitale.com
31. Developer @thomasvitale.com
32. Developer Platform API @thomasvitale.com
33. Developer Platform API @thomasvitale.com
34. Configuration: Workload API Crossplane Composition @thomasvitale.com
35. Configuration: Implementation Crossplane Composition Workload API Serverless Deployment Service Binding Application Conventions @thomasvitale.com
36. Delivering Value From code to production Developer Production Application Operator Security Expert Platform Engineer @thomasvitale.com
37. backstage.io @thomasvitale.com
38. Thomas Vitale @thomasvitale.com thomasvitale.com Developer Experience On Kubernetes