Developers Demand UX for K8s!
Watch talk on YouTubeA talk by UX and software people at Red Hat (Podman team). The talk mainly followed the academic study process (aka this is the survey I did for my bachelor’s/master’s thesis).
Research
- User research Study including 11 devs and platform engineers over three months
- Focus was on a new Podman desktop feature
- Experience range 2-3 years experience average (low no experience, high old school kube)
- 16 questions regarding environment, workflow, debugging and pain points
- Analysis: Affinity mapping
Findings
- Where do I start when things are broken? -> There may be solutions, but devs don’t know about them
- Network debugging is hard b/c many layers and problems occurring in between CNI and infra are really hard -> Network topology issues are rare but hard
- YAML indentation -> Tool support is needed for visualization
- YAML validation -> Just use validation in dev and GitOps
- YAML Cleanup -> Normalize YAML (order, anchors, etc.) for easy diff
- Inadequate security analysis (too verbose, non-issues are warnings) -> Real-time insights (and during dev)
- Crash Loop -> Identify stuck containers, simple debug containers
- CLI vs GUI -> Enable experience level oriented GUI, Enhance in-time troubleshooting
General issues
- No direct fs access
- Multiple kubeconfigs
- SaaS is sometimes only provided on kube, which sounds like complexity
- Where do I begin my troubleshooting
- Interoperability/Fragility with updates