How Ada’s Platform Team Scaled Development Workflows with Kubernetes

Loft Team

March 29, 2023

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Key Takeaways

At Ada, we have been able to create a dedicated remote testing environment for our development teams to use.

DevSpace and Loft provides the necessary abstraction to solve most of the development needs.

The team is considering changing this to an opt-out functionality, where every PR would get a DevSpace environment.

The implementation of Loft has been beneficial for the development team. Ada created a project to deploy a remote ephemeral environment in a PR, and implemented end-to-end testing per PR. Onboarding was designed to create an experience for engineering teams to quickly get started. Devspace for development was created to reduce reliance on local development.

Chapter 1: Scaling workflows with Kubernetes

Robert Dippolito discussed how Ada's platform team scaled workflows and development workflows with Kubernetes

He discussed the benefits of remote development environments and the pain points Ada experienced

He explained how they used Loft and DevSpace to help improve and implement remote developer environments

He noted that understanding Kubernetes and containers is a big asset and that abstractions can help abstract away complexities.

Chapter 2: DevSpace - A Remote Ephemeral Environment

Engineering teams needed a way to push changes to a shared development cluster and test them on remote infrastructure.

DevSpace was developed to solve these issues, with controls such as remote sleeping and automatic deletion for resource management.

It was further developed to allow engineering teams to develop on a remote container and integrate with CI/CD.

Chapter 3: Ada's DevSpace Deployment.

Ada created a project to deploy a remote ephemeral environment in a PR, and implemented end-to-end testing per PR. Onboarding was designed to create an experience for engineering teams to quickly get started. Devspace for development was created to reduce reliance on local development.

Chapter 4: Automated Testing with Loft

Loft has created a remote testing environment with helpful links to logs and PR bot, a Dev Space Resource Center and a Slack channel for issues.

Automated unit and integration tests run against every remote push, and end-to-end tests are run prior to merge.

Automation and tests are also included in release pipelines to ensure changes are represented in PRs.

Chapter 5: Implementing Loft for Kubernetes Clusters

Loft, a control plane, was implemented on top of Kubernetes Cluster to reduce friction due to security controls and layers

Engineers can log into the Loft dashboard to monitor their DevSpace deployments

Chapter 6: DevSpace and Loft for Remote Infrastructure Testing

Team tasked with finding a way to test changes on remote infrastructure identified pain points and found DevSpace and Loft could provide necessary abstraction to solve them.

Adoption of DevSpace resulted in shorter cycle times and ability to experiment quickly, with low infrastructure costs due to sleep mode feature.