TUTORIAL

Many organizations using Node.js adopt cloud native development practices with the goal of shipping features faster. The technologies and architectures may change when we move to the cloud, but the fact remains that we all still add the occasional bug to our code. The challenge here is that many of your existing local debugging tools and practices can’t be used when everything is running in a container or on the cloud. A change in approach is required!

Local Debugging with Mocks and Stubs Only Gets You So Far

One of the biggest challenges when working with a microservice system is spinning up all of your services locally when testing and debugging…

The ability to easily and completely understand your software system is vitally important, particularly when things are on fire at 3 AM and you’ve just been paged. You need to quickly establish your service dependencies, identify who owns each service involved within the Kubernetes cluster, and locate their communication channels.

This ability to understand systems applies equally during development time too. Especially when working within high performing teams that are building large numbers of microservices and deploying to a dynamic environment like Kubernetes.

Today we are pleased to share a deeper look into the brand new Ambassador Service Catalog, a…

I had the pleasure of presenting at the GOTOpia EU on Tuesday and Wednesday this week, and I decided to role out an entirely new talk based on our current approach to building effective developer workflows at Ambassador Labs: “Cloud Native Development Without the Toil: An Overview of Practices and Tooling”.

The Need For an Opinionated Development Workflow

We all know that the CNCF do amazing work in the cloud community, and we also all know that the CNCF tooling landscape is a bit of an eye chart. This is understandable though, as the core purpose of the landscape is to show the breadth of technologies.

What…

The Ambassador Labs team and I have settled safely back into our daily routines after another excellent (virtual) KubeCon NA event last week. There were so many great sessions, and we all thoroughly enjoyed the hallway track and Slack channels discussions

Although no travel was involved this year there was still a lot of logistics to figure out, and so a massive tip of the hat to the entire CNCF KubeCon + CloudNativeCon team!

Here are our top five takeaways from the event:

• Platforms as product: Self-service is essential
• Safety (and speed): Move fast and don’t break things
• DevSecOps: Security…

I love creating live demonstrations of the latest thing I’ve been working on for KubeCon, but let’s be honest, creating *good* tech demos is not easy! I wanted to share a couple of learnings from the past few years, which may help those of you (and future me…) that are still struggling to finalize your demo.

Start with the Story

It doesn’t matter how technical the demo will be — whether it’s dev-focused or ops-focusing, using the command line or a GUI, or showing a pet project or commercial product — you need a story in order to capture the watcher’s attention and draw…

If you have ever worked on a greenfield web-based application you will have experienced the pain of testing your application with TLS enabled. It’s easy to spin up an app or microservice and access this via an IP address or localhost, but this isn’t a fully qualified domain name and doesn’t quite behave in the same way. And if you’re containerizing your app and deploying to something like Kubernetes, then you’ll potentially want to configure your API gateway to terminate TLS before proxying requests through.

So what are your options?

Self-Signed Certificates

There are many instructions to be found online for using…

It’s easy enough to spin up a local skeleton Kubernetes environment using tools like minikube, microk8s, or k3s, but getting an application-ready Kubernetes cluster that can route user-generated (or test) traffic to observable backend services is more challenging. In order to be productive, engineers need to move from working with a simple skeleton cluster to a “dancing skeleton”, application-ready Kubernetes environment. The K8s Initializer can help you do just this!

Production-like Networking Challenges

In order to illustrate some of the challenges with bootstrapping a cluster for development, let’s run through a couple of common scenarios. If you are moving from a local development…

The first batch of the Ambassador Labs Livin’ on Edge podcasts has seen four superb guests sharing their wisdom and experiences on creating cloud platforms and building effective developer experiences. Here are our top four takeaways from the conversations:

• The cloud developer experience can be “complicated”
• A cloud platform must be managed as a product
• The old “staging environment” model needs updating
• Don’t underestimate the value of continuous delivery

The remainder of this article explores each of these takeaways in more detail.

You can find the Soundcloud links to the recent episodes below, and you can also subscribe on other…