Developer Experience on Kubernetes
Over the last 15 years, I’ve been working with tools, frameworks, projects, and Kubernetes extensions that aim to help teams build and deliver cloud native applications. These applications are not simple, and the tools required to manage and master the whole software delivery lifecycle are quite overwhelming even in 2025.
As an industry, we have made significant leaps forward to fill the gaps and created new practices and frameworks to help organizations keep pace with these technological changes. While there is hype around AI today, and how LLMs will produce code for us, we are still in an industry that is measured purely by how good or how innovative the end-user solutions we create are. We need to deliver changes to our users; it doesn’t matter how we do it, but we just need to ensure that we are efficient and serious about the whole process.
Writing, talking, and sharing with organizations extensively about Platform Engineering in the Kubernetes space led me on a journey where the tools being discussed are often closer to infrastructure than to developers. The natural next step is to bring developers closer to platform engineering teams, but different expectations, backgrounds, tooling, and priorities from both sides make these conversations slow and unproductive.
In November 2024, Thomas Vitale (author of Cloud Native Spring in Action, with Kubernetes) and I signed a contract with Manning Publishing to co-author a book on Developer Experience on Kubernetes. The Manning Early Access Program (MEAP) was announced at KubeCon EU 2025 (check our KubeCon session about the topic), and it is now available on their website.
Writing a book is not done in a basement, away from everyone; similarly to my previous book, we are writing this book with the help of different communities that provide advice, reviews, early feedback, and valuable input to make the book more useful for a wider audience. As it is a tradition for technical books, we are hosting all the examples on GitHub, free of charge and totally independent from the book https://github.com/devex-on-k8s/book
If you are interested in developer experience in the cloud native space, we encourage you to get in touch, check the examples, and explore the MEAP.
Our current table of contents is divided into three parts:
- The inner loop: tasks, friction points, and tools
- The outer loop: optimization, APIs, system integrations, and observability
- How to bring Platform Engineers and Developers to collaborate more efficiently
We aim to provide practical experience with open-source tools to solve real-life problems and identify how we can create smoother developer experiences by leveraging the expertise of cloud native communities. With Thomas, we are extremely passionate about helping platform teams understand the value of crafting end-to-end developer experiences. At the same time, this book helps developers understand the value of platform services and initiatives that can simplify the entire software development lifecycle.
To keep this blog post short, please check my DevBCN presentation on the topic, which provides an overview of what the book is about and showcases some of the tools we are covering.