Choose Your Own Adventure: The Treacherous Trek to Development

From the moment of their inception as source code on the developer’s laptop, our hero knows that they are destined for great things. They long to be a real, running application, living in production, serving end users! But the epic journey to production is an arduous one, filled with cascading choices — choices concerning app design, testing, security, container image building, deployment strategy, and observability, to name a few. And who knows what other unseen forces lurk in the shadows! One wrong step could be catastrophic. It is up to us, the audience, to guide our hero; and to help them grow from source code to container image, to their final form as a running application in production. In this ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’-style talk, Whitney and Viktor will present a linear view of all of the choices that an anthropomorphized application must make as they try to find their way to the fabled land of production. There are many paths to production, and we will only be able to cover a few of them in this talk. So, we'll limit the journey to the development phase of the application lifecycle. Throughout the presentation, the audience will use a voting app to choose which path our hero application will take. Can we navigate CNCF projects and avoid pitfalls and dead-ends to get our application to the development environment before the session time elapses? **Benefits to the Ecosystem** When working with cloud native technologies, it is easy to get deep into one part of the system and lose sight of the bigger picture. On the other hand, the big picture can be difficult to make out because there are such a huge number of considerations, use cases, and CNCF projects. This talk will discuss one opinionated path to production (chosen by the audience!) while playfully acknowledging that this particular route is one of an infinite number of possible paths. It will give the audience a broader sense of what types of technologies are out there, and what factors to consider when making system design choices. The session will be engaging, relatable, and accessible to beginners because it will give human emotion to our application who is traversing the path to production. It will also be interactive and evoke the nostalgia that many folks feel from reading ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ books as a kid.