As a developer, your goal is to write great code and solve business problems. Efficiency is a key part of being a developer, but being efficient within a team isn’t just about what’s in your head. You need the right tools and technology to work quickly and create the best applications.
The challenge of integrating new tools and frameworks into a platform of some kind can be a distraction from your primary task of solving business problems. While Kubernetes has become a popular platform for developers, it’s not a complete development platform by itself.
How can you get the container-based development platform you need that incorporates your architects’, operations’, and developers’ needs in a single place? You could build it yourself, but that takes time and resources and knowledge that your team might not have right now.
That’s where a new open source-based offering from IBM comes in. The IBM Cloud Pak for Applications (ICPA) brings together the Kubernetes-based Red Hat OpenShift platform with Kabanero, an open source project that makes it faster and easier for enterprises to develop and deploy applications for Kubernetes and Knative.
In this blog post, we take a closer look at the underlying open source software ICPA is built on and some common development problems it addresses.
A closer look at the problem
Teams often adopt Kubernetes with a goal to streamline development and deployments and gain all the benefits of containerization. But they don’t account for the complexity that comes with a container environment. While Kubernetes does a great job of managing container placement on a server infrastructure, routing work to those containers, and bringing them back to life after a failure, it alone can’t fully support developers and architects trying to build cloud-native applications.
Building a platform for a development team is a significant undertaking. You need to account for everything — from selecting and integrating the right set of open source projects to choosing IDEs and build tools, pipelines, source control, security scanning and testing. When you add updates and security fixes, it becomes a full-time development job. Our goal is to solve these problems and reduce the complexity in order to boost the productivity of all developers in a team. So, how do we do that?
Let’s start by recognizing that a certain amount of consistency is good. Consistent tools help teams build efficiently and share knowledge. Consistent tools lead to a consistent delivery process that everyone can understand, and a consistent process reduces the risk of human error. Automation for the win.
Improving collaboration between different parts of an organization and within a team is fundamental to increasing productivity. Architects and developers need a consistent mechanism for capturing their technology decisions and then sharing them with the wider team.
For many teams the use of containers is a step in this direction and an obvious pairing with Kubernetes. Yet, the freedom and flexibility containers offer means it’s easy to end up with too many containers. Too much choice leads to complexity, inconsistency, and inefficiency.
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