The Developer Control Plane

In a cloud native world, software developers are no longer only responsible for writing code. Today’s developers must write and package code, deploy these services into production, and make sure that the corresponding applications continue to run correctly when released into production. To borrow a phrase from the Netflix engineering team, full stack developers are becoming full lifecycle developers.

In addition to coding, cloud native developers are now also responsible for shipping and running applications.

For years, operations teams have addressed operational complexity in software applications by adopting control planes that provide appropriate abstractions and aggregation of control. These control planes provide automated cluster management (e.g., cloud-managed Kubernetes control planes), L7 traffic traffic management (e.g., service mesh), and more. Now is the time for developers to adopt a control plane.

What is a Developer Control Plane?

A developer control plane enables developers to control and configure the entire cloud development loop in order to ship software faster.

3 Pillars of the Developer Control Plane

Cloud native developers are now responsible for 3 components of the cloud native development stack - coding new services, shipping them to production, and running them over time.

Code

Developers need to easily build and ship code:

- Configure and maintain development and testing environments

- Discover APIs available for coding

Ship

Developers need to release updates without breaking the application:

- Canary release new versions of a service safely to end users

- Understand which versions of a service are deployed and released

Run

Developers need to keep their services running 24x7:

- Mitigate issues with updates

- Monitor updates for anomalous behavior

Code

Coding services on Kubernetes can be a slog. The container-build-push-deploy loop saps productivity and impedes flow. Setting up a development environment that runs multiple microservices is a bunch of work, and keeping all the services up to date is even more work.

To be productive, developers must maintain configuration for:

- Their development environment

- Source control

- Continuous integration tooling

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Ship

Shipping code changes to production requires a complicated dance between many different pieces of software. Shipping software incrementally is a safer way to release new features to your users. For cloud native applications, many developers are now responsible for progressive delivery.

To ship incrementally, developers must maintain configuration for:

- Continuous deployment

- Manifest management

- Container management

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Run

No matter how careful you are with testing and canary rollouts, things still go awry in production. Advanced L7 traffic management capabilities such as load balancing, rate limiting, and circuit breaking in order are critical to ensure the availability and scalability of your microservices. Being able to respond quickly to production incidents is a critical part of your workflow.

To keep their services running, developers must maintain configuration for:

- API management

- Kubernetes runtime

- Observability

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