Tektonis a fantastic project that allows to build pipelines for your CI/CD needs. It works really great as it takes advantage of dynamic nature of Kubernetes cluster and uses resources only when it actually executes a task.
Tasks that are executed can be pretty much anything that starts a container (pod) and executes. There is a huge collection of tasks available in Tekton Hub that can be easily used within your own pipelines. Have a further read about Tekton if you're not familiar with it here.
There is just one tiny issue - tasks in Tetkon are mainly about executing things and not waiting for things. And here comes Automatiko that plugs into the Tekton ecosystem via Custom Tasks. Custom tasks (realized in Tekton as Runs) allow to provide additional capabilities that are not meant to execute things - like starting a container/pod. Read complete article at automatiko blog
Here is more of a developer view on the recently published article on Automatiko blog about building Kubernetes Operators with workflows. It shows that is brings significant value to the overall visibility of the operator logic and makes it really approachable for non kubernetes gurus.
I'd like to take it a bit further and show how efficient it can be thanks to the internals of Automatiko. Automatiko takes advantage of Quarkus that provide the runtime mechanics so to say. Quarkus comes with an outstanding feature called dev mode. Everyone who heard about Quarkus most likely heard about dev mode and live reload. But there is more to it!!!
Remote dev mode - is a sibling to the dev mode but it allows you to live reload application remotely. A perfect fit for in-container development or even better in kubernetes cluster development. This brings us to the unbelievable efficient developer experience when building Kubernetes operators - you can build them directly inside the Kubernetes cluster. No need for rebuilding the image, no need to redeploying the container and so on... it just works like a charm.
Have a look at this video illustrating how you can easily work on your operator logic that runs inside the kubernetes cluster. Make modifications to the logic and try it out almost instantly (assuming your kubernetes cluster and deployed container have enough resources to make it efficient ;)).
The video showed number of features
how to configure the application to run in remote dev mode
how to make changes to the workflow definition
how to make modification to application code
automatic reload of the application that includes both workflow and java classes
All working smoothly and efficiently without much of a hassle
A huge kudos to Quarkus team for making it a fantastic piece of software that makes developer life easier... a truly cloud native as it enables direct in cluster development that speeds the work up significantly!!!
