Over the last few blog posts, I have covered critical elements of developer tooling for Kubernetes and how things are looking in 2021. As we continue to dive into that discussion, we must not forget the process of building container images. Of course, most of us create our images by writing Dockerfiles and building them with the Docker engine. And yet, more and more teams are adopting newer alternatives.

If you have been keeping track, I recently started a series of blog posts about the state of developer tooling in the Kubernetes ecosystem in 2021. The first blog post covered the topic of defining Kubernetes applications, i.e., how you go about declaring, packaging, customizing, and deploying them. You can check out that up to date comparison between category leaders Helm and Kustomize right here.

As all developers know, when building software things don’t always go as planned. In fact, most of the time they don’t. With today’s modern distributed architectures it’s more important than ever to have the proper tools in your toolbelt. This allows us to automate as much of the software delivery lifecycle as possible and then be able to immediately triage issues when they arise.

Take a look at your application as it runs on your server or the cloud. You’re so proud of it. Admire it as it’s processing data, interacting with the user, and doing magical things. You should be very proud of it- you wrote a lot of code to make it happen. But, honestly, how much of the code in your application is your code?

In a recent blog post, one of my teammates, Josh, shared a few techniques for deploying Java agents in Kubernetes applications. We have been getting a lot of interest in the concepts we have shared and, per popular request, decided to raise the bar. Is it possible to add a Java agent without changing a single line in either the Dockerfile or the Kubernetes Manifest? Well, the answer is most definitely yes (!), and here’s how.

In the world of software development, there’s no such thing as writing perfect code. As such, almost every software developer ends up spending a great deal of their time debugging code. Therefore, one of the best ways to increase your efficiency as a developer is to have the ability to locate errors, identify the root cause, and fix it to resolve problems in your codebase.

As all dev managers, including ourselves, have witnessed, the last few years have been characterized by unprecedented and rapid technological advances. Due to this, there has been a fundamental change in the way applications are being developed. The software world as we knew it shifted from monolithic app development to new methods such as microservices architectures, cloud functions, and distributed systems that are faster and more agile.

Over the last few years, we have seen an avalanche of tools to enable easier software development on Kubernetes (let’s face it, it is quite hard out of the box). As often happens in growing ecosystems, some tools grow and adapt, while others get left behind, or at the very least, merged into new offerings. What’s a better way to open 2021 than with an up-to-date review of the options we have?