Using DevSpace to Usher in an Era of Peace for Our Developers

Using DevSpace to improve developer experience by addressing pain points in development clusters, local environment setup, and end-to-end testing.

• Shared development clusters and complex local environment setup made it difficult for developers to test and deploy code efficiently.
• Implemented DevSpace to create safe spaces for developers to test and improve productivity.
• Created hundreds of ephemeral dev environments to improve code quality.
• Addressed pain points through surveys and understanding developer perspectives.
• Implemented DevSpace for core services and iteratively improved upon workflows.
• Built monitors, alerts, and visibility dashboards to proactively address issues.
• Found DevSpace experts and standardized workflows across the organization.
• Improved developer experience and code quality.
• Future plans include wider adoption and standardization across all services.

Developers faced challenges with shared development clusters and complex local environment setup, leading to longer cycle times and difficulty in running end-to-end tests. To address these pain points, the platform team implemented DevSpace and created safe spaces for developers to test and improve productivity. They created hundreds of ephemeral dev environments and iteratively improved workflows, building monitors, alerts, and visibility dashboards to proactively address issues. They found DevSpace experts and standardized workflows across the organization, improving developer experience and code quality. Future plans include wider adoption and standardization across all services.

At Ada, our software engineers are the superstars who bring our products to life. Yet they used to have to jump through complex hurdles to develop and deploy their code to production. They had to share testing clusters, solve a myriad of puzzles to set up local environments, and request multiple teams to gain access to the deployment environments. This clearly bruised their developer experience and hampered their velocity. Faith in their code dwindled as they played Hunger Games with other developers, and that made their testing experience miserable. Our platform team decided to take the action and implemented a solution using open source tools, including Kubernetes and DevSpace. We were able to create a safe space for our developers to test and rapidly improve their developer productivity. Since then, our developers have created hundreds of ephemeral dev environments to satisfy their testing needs, which has greatly improved the quality of code deployed to production. How did we do it? Join us for this case study to find out.