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This article was inspired by our recent "5 tools to increase Kubernetes developer productivity" video, hosted by Saiyam Pathak and Kunal Kushwaha. Over the years Kubernetes has become the de facto orchestration platform, as such it's crucial that developers have the right set of tools to increase their productivity for development and operations. In this article, we take a look at five such tools that can help developers inprove productivity while when Kubernetes. Let’s jump in.

Continuing on from Part One where we went through a brief history of containers and Kubernetes then Dockerized a NodeJS application, now we are ready to deploy to Kubernetes. If this is your first or nth time deploying to Kubernetes, Shipa makes this simple. You don’t have to worry about authoring multiple Kubernetes manifests and templates to deploy your application, all you need is an image.

KoolKits (Kubernetes toolkits) are highly-opinionated, language-specific, batteries-included debug container images for Kubernetes. In practice, they’re what you would’ve installed on your production pods if you were stuck during a tough debug session in an unfamiliar shell. To briefly give some background, note that these container images are intended for use with the new kubectl debug feature, which spins up Ephemeral containers for interactive troubleshooting.

Creating a DevOps workflow to optimize application deployments to your Kubernetes cluster can be a complex journey. I recently demonstrated how to optimize your local K8s development workflow with Rancher Desktop and Skaffold. If you haven’t seen it yet, you can watch it by viewing the video below. You might be wondering, “What happens next?” How do you extend this solution beyond a local setup to a real-world pipeline with a remote cluster?

Why this combination you ask? Load testing is my passion, and I am partial to Kubernetes. I challenged myself to share a use case that many could relate to, focused on a business critical application. Websites came to mind and WordPress is the world’s most popular website management system. Of course, nginx is the most popular web server so let’s throw that into the mix. And Kubernetes? With more than 50% of corporations adopting Kubernetes in 2021, what better system to run in.

Since its introduction in 2014 to the world, Kubernetes has been helping usher in the next generation of distributed workloads. As workloads started to be containerized, so did the need to manage the containers, thus the inception of container orchestrators. There have been a few container orchestrators out there before Kubernetes such as Docker Swarm and Apache Mesos. Though as a feature developer, Kubernetes can certainly feel like an 800-pound gorilla in the room.