customer story

Decomposing a Monolith To Unlock Developer Velocity

“Adding DevSpace to a project is a superpower.”

Developer Experience Team Lead

Without Loft

Monolithic Stack + Slow Releases

Our software stack was developed as a monolith, hindering development and slowing the release process to a crawl. Frequent releases were impossible with this monolithic architecture.

We knew we had to find a way to decompose our tech stack while at the same time ensuring that developers would still be able to spin up the stack without everyone having to become an expert in Kubernetes and other container technologies.

Drawbacks:

  • All teams had to release in lockstep.
  • Integration testing was a nightmare due to inflexible static environments and a hard-to-replicate application stack composition.
  • We could only release a few times a year.
With Loft

Microservices + 10x Velocity

We initially looked at Tilt and Okteto, but I really liked the clean UI of Loft for managing users, namespaces and virtual clusters, and the flexibility that DevSpace provides compared to other tools was key for our decision to move forward with DevSpace and Loft.

We are now successfully decomposing our stack into microservices and we are managing every service with Loft and DevSpace. So far, we have 6 projects configured to use Loft and DevSpace - with more to come.

Advantage:

  • Each team can release at their own pace.
  • Full integration tests can be done inside virtual clusters.
  • Provisioning Kubernetes-based dev and test environments works with a single command.
  • Development workflows are encoded in the devspace.yaml file and everyone can start working on any microservice without a lot of training or Kubernete knowledge.
Why loft

Gets Kubernetes Out of the Way

Without Loft, our teams would have needed to "Learn and understand Kubernetes" before even starting development. Since learning Kubernetes is like "eating a whale," you need to have some way to start, and Loft helps teams to get productive NOW. It gets Kubernetes out of the way and allows developers to develop without learning anything new except for a single command: devspace dev - And getting familiar with this command is definitely worth it because it unlocks a great developer experience for anyone having to develop against Kubernetes as a deployment target.

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