Developers Demand UX for K8s!

Watch talk on YouTube

A 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