Another post inspired by our weekly internal enablement office hours [should we open this up to the public?] and a few conversations at DevOps Days Atlanta, talking about the experience with Kubernetes can reverberate some sighs. Though in our weekly enablement office hours, the blunt question was asked “well why is Kubernetes so difficult?”. Industry thought leaders would state that Kubernetes is a platform to build other platforms.

Another conversation that was recently had during our weekly field enablement office hours here at Shipa was “what exactly is a microservice?”. Certainly, a term that has been used to describe a paradigm and architectural practice. One can argue that the breaking down or decomposing of applications has been going on for decades and is not a monumental shift in computing. There are several definitions of microservices from a purist definition to a definition resembling a movement.

As the GitOps paradigm continues to evolve, different interpretations and implementations will continue to appear. SUSE Rancher Fleet is a project creating a powerful, lightweight, and scalable GitOps engine. Recently, we showed the art of the possible between Shipa and SUSE Rancher Fleet. Make sure to check out our joint solution brief where the intersection of the SUSE Rancher and Shipa stacks come together.

Depending if you are in the Northern Hemisphere, Spring is upon us. We have been busy at Shipa democratizing developer experience for all and making Kubernetes an afterthought. Grateful for all the community and customer feedback helping us make Shipa better. If you have an idea, check out our new Idea Portal where you can your own ideas. Let’s take a look at what we have delivered in the last pair of sprints.

The DevOps and Platform Engineering space certainly is one that evolves fast. As new development paradigms get consumed, supporting the development pipeline is crucial. Pushing a public release of v0.2.x on March 30th, 2022, Dagger, from the creators of Docker, is another approach in portability and consistency in CI/CD pipelines. What the Docker Container has done applications, Dagger is hoping to achieve that with CI/CD pipelines.

The beauty of Shipa is that no matter how the surrounding ecosystem changes e.g your Continuous Delivery or Infrastructure-as-Code stacks, the Shipa API stays the same. If you are curious about interacting with this mystical API, there are a lot of surrounding integrations that do that for you. Though, if you want to directly interact with the API, you can send out HTTP requests to the Shipa API itself to create any sort of integration you require.

Kubernetes is becoming a dominant platform for running workloads. As the Kubernetes ecosystem continues to advance capturing a wider swath of workloads, eventually your code might be headed to Kubernetes. As a Tech Lead at Shipa responsible for front-end engineering e.g what you see on the screen, my job crosses JavaScript Frameworks and Kubernetes on a daily basis.

When I was making my first switch from a product engineering team to being field facing software engineer, one of my first projects was an integration project for a federal agency. The very first piece of enterprise software minus my productivity and development suite I was exposed to was BMC’s Control-M about 15 years ago. A lot of batch files to extract and transform data had to be run in order and on a daily basis; Control-M at the time was a job runner.

One more blog topic stemming from our weekly office hours that we hold with the field team here at Shipa. In our last office hours, was asked a question about “what are the difference between DevOps Engineers and SREs?”. Both professions are emerging disciplines and cultures that continue to evolve and play an importance in technology organizations. I’ve been fortunate to have written and spoken about this before; though taking a fresh look at what the two domains try to accomplish.

Creating development environments on Kubernetes has been a topic discussed many times. As teams increase the number of developers using Kubernetes, it continues to be a challenge for many developers. This post aims to show how you can leverage Shipa to create environments and make them available to developers in just a few minutes!