Improving Dev Experience: How We Built a Cloud Native Dev Stack At Scale

The presentation discusses the challenges faced by developers in the current environment and proposes a solution called Dev Stack to simplify the developer workflow and reduce time wastage.

• Challenges faced by developers include time loss due to restrictions and changes in the development process, integrations with third-party gateways, and cognitive overload in infrastructure provisioning and debugging
• Dev Stack is an open-source solution that focuses on reducing cognitive load on developers by streamlining workflow, providing environmental consistency, and faster feedback loop from local development
• Dev Stack uses tools like Dev Space for file sync-based approach, Helm File for orchestration of multiple services, and Helm Hooks for provisioning ephemeral infrastructure resources
• The solution is opinionated and fits the presenter's use cases best
• The goal is to simplify the developer workflow, reduce rollout time, and make feature development more productive and constructive

The presenter talks about the limitations of the previous approach of using Telepresence for proxy-based approach, which resulted in slow responses and connectivity issues. The new approach of using Dev Space for file sync-based approach and hot reloading library inside the container avoids container restarts and short circuits the feedback loop by just running a command.

The session will shed light work of improving Razorpay's dev experience using a bunch of open source tools that scales to 100's of engineers,in a secure and compliant fashion We talk about extending cloud native development to local desktop,how it integrates with our overall kubernetes driven CI/CD workflows.In a nutshell,the session describes building a dev centric packaged environment for reducing their cognitive load while developing sofware This talk brings clarity to the application cluster development , and shows the work being done on aggregating various open source solutions like helmfile for describing and setting up a micro service fleet , traefik routing,header propagation for ephemeral service access ,helm hooks for auxilary app requirements like queues,databases,vendor cloud components, hot reloading and devspace for integrated dev local development/debugging and autoscaler,janitor,botkube etc for cluster segregation and management In the end ,this talk hopefully aligns the developers,practitioners and operators to the benefit of local development with faster iterations , customizable dev tools in remote kubernetes cluster with an extremely simplified , cost effective ,git ops native and agile solution impacting the entire org's dev productivity