Shifting Left with Kubernetes

Track: Practices and other tech
Abstract
The Shift Left philosophy is a product of the Agile movement. Its practices encourage teams to test and validate software as early in the process as possible. It’s been shown that the earlier issues are found and addressed that overall quality, time to delivery, and project costs improve. As teams adopt Shift Left, one notable exception is often overlooked. That is deployment. Over the past decade, application deployment has steadily become more of a software effort. The argument can easily be made that validating application deployment, which has primarily become a software effort, is just as much a candidate for Shift Left as the application itself. With containerization continuing its rise on becoming the application deployment norm, the notion of a production-like system deployed as far left in the cycle as a developer’s workstation is a practical reality. In organizations that have adopted Kubernetes, each phase of the delivery pipeline is able to accurately replicate a production environment. In this session, we will examine the benefits and challenges of Shifting Left by building and validating Kubernetes-based deployments. Topics include replicating production environments starting with development workstations, strategies for maintaining deployment code alongside application source code, considerations for artifact registries and repositories, and tooling that can assist at each stage.
Ray Elenteny
With over 35 years of experience, Ray thoroughly enjoys sharing his experience by helping organizations deliver high-quality applications that drive business value. Ray has a passion for software engineering, and over the past ten years, Ray has taken a keen interest in the cultural and technical dynamics of efficiently delivering applications. Ray has been working with containers since 2014 and Kubernetes since 2017. For multiple years he served as an Atlanta Docker Meetup organizer. He has introduced Docker and Kubernetes to multiple organizations that are using them in production today. Ray has authored several articles on topics ranging from deployment pipelines, building Docker images, Kubernetes as a development tool, and architectural patterns for microservices in Kubernetes.