Chapter 1: Code, Build, Test, and Repeat – The Application Development Inner Loop

Building and deploying cloud-native applications can be cumbersome for local and remote development if you are not using the appropriate tools. Developers go through a lot of pain to automate the build, push, and deploy steps. In this book, we will introduce you to Skaffold, which helps automate these development workflow steps. You will learn how to use the Skaffold CLI to accelerate the inner development loop and how to create effective continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines and perform build and deployment to manage Kubernetes instances such as Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Microsoft's Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), and Amazon's Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS).

This chapter will define the inner loop for application development and its importance, comparing the inner with the outer development loops, and cover the typical development workflows for a traditional monolith application and a container-native microservices application. We will have an in-depth discussion about the differences between these two approaches.

In this chapter, we're going to cover the following main topics:

• Understanding what the application development inner loop is
• Inner versus outer development loops
• Exploring the traditional application development inner loop
• Checking out the container-native application development inner loop

By the end of this chapter, you will understand the traditional and container-native application inner development loops.