How to Start Your Cloud-Native Kubernetes Journey

Learning journeys for developers coding, shipping, and running apps under the full service ownership model

Kate Packard
Ambassador Labs

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Learning is always a journey, and with complex subjects like cloud-native app development and Kubernetes, it can be hard for a developer to know where to start. For developers moving from a more traditional developer workflow, where the focus is on coding, the ‘full lifecycle development’ experience creates new responsibilities and, in turn, a lot to learn.

We have recently developed a set of new learning journeys to help developers cut through the weeds. These modules will help newcomers to Kubernetes to gain a fundamental understanding of important Kubernetes concepts as well as step-by-step, hands-on tutorials using a variety of open source tools. This post will provide an overview of the available learning modules and preview what’s yet to come.

Start the journey: How to Create a Productive Local Development Environment with Kubernetes

The first learning journey starts with the basics: how a developer can create a productive local dev environment for Kubernetes. Most experienced developers know that there are configurations and tools they need to be productive, but cloud-native development adds some complexity to the mix. We’ve published the first in a series of learning journeys to guide the set-up of a productive dev environment, and the background, concepts, and tools needed to speed up the development feedback loop and get code running in a containerized environment.

The Journey Continues: Investigating and Debugging Microservices on Kubernetes

As if the challenge of getting the dev environment weren’t enough, Kubernetes introduces friction when trying to understand why code isn’t working. Bug investigation and diagnosis was more straightforward in the pre-cloud era. With microservices, containers, and Kubernetes, locating a problem requires digging through several layers of distributed complexity. Our second learning journey delves into the importance of service visibility in troubleshooting and debugging. We’ll also get hands-on with several tools to help make gathering insights and debugging easier.

Ship: Continuous Deployment & Getting Your App into Production on Kubernetes

The next learning journey looks at how to safely deploy code to production. Continuous delivery on Kubernetes is not straightforward, even for developers familiar with traditional CI/CD. In the third learning journey, we cover how progressive delivery principles and risk mitigation techniques, such as canary releases, can keep delivery flowing while minimizing the risk of outages and failures. The tutorial looks at CI delivery framework tools like Argo for automating GitOps-style deployments.

Still to come: Always on the run

Still to come in our getting-started learning journey series: actually running your apps and managing your cluster edge.

Nothing would happen if traffic weren’t coming in and being routed to shipped services. The “Run” learning journey will cover getting traffic from the edge to your service, load balancing and various traffic and routing management concepts and tools required for running apps. It will take a look at the overall concept of full service ownership and the importance of observability.

Get more hands-on learning

If you want to learn even more about cloud-native development and Kubernetes, we have even more learning opportunities available in our Summer of Kubernetes program. The Summer of Kubernetes offers lessons guided by both internal Ambassador Labs and external cloud-native and Kubernetes experts as well as support from a whole community of fellow learners. Summer of K8s is free to join and delivers three month-long chapters that cover the full app development lifecycle: code, ship, and run, just like the learning journeys.

Think of the learning journeys as a textbook, and the challenges in the Summer of K8s program like fun, hands-on ways to try things out for yourself at your own pace. Most exciting of all, the Summer of K8s program comes with the opportunity to win prizes as you make your way through the lessons.

Tell us what’s working for you

Help us learn from you as you tackle these learning journeys. We are continuing to build and improve as we go, and your feedback is valuable. Please file an issue or pull request in the documentation repository or by joining our Slack.

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