Santosh Banda is a software engineer at DoorDash, since early 2020 , working on the developer productivity team where he is focused on microservice pe

Fast Feedback Loop for Kubernetes Product Development in a Production Environment

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2022-06-23 19:30:08

Santosh Banda is a software engineer at DoorDash, since early 2020 , working on the developer productivity team where he is focused on microservice performance, shift left, and testing in production. He holds a bachelors degree from IIT Guwahati.

As DoorDash continues its rapid growth, product development must keep up the pace and move new features into production faster and with high reliability. Shipping features without previewing them in the production Kubernetes environment is a risky proposition and could slow down the product development process because any bugs or defects would send everything back to the drawing board. In a Kubernetes environment, developers must build, push, and deploy docker images in the cluster to preview their features before they are pushed to production. This previewing process was too slow for DoorDash’s needs, so the development productivity team had to find a way to build a faster feedback loop.

As an initial workaround, teams built ad-hoc scripts that leveraged Kubernetes port-forward to access service dependencies running inside the cluster from developer workstations. These ad-hoc scripts created a fast feedback loop for developers to run their microservice locally with actual service dependencies.