Lightbend – the company providing cloud-native microservices frameworks for some of the world’s largest brands – recently announced a completely new Developer Experience (DX) for Kalix, a unique Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering that delivers an innovative programming model explicitly designed to quickly build scalable, mission-critical, stateful applications in a serverless architecture while focusing solely on the application’s business logic.
Kalix works with underlying cloud infrastructure to mask the complexity of building cloud-native apps based on Kubernetes. With this announcement, Lightbend has revamped its Kalix experience with new capabilities across all phases of the developer’s journey, including development, testing, deployment, and insight into the health and performance of applications and services running on Kalix.
The DX experience that high-performing organizations strive for ensures the tools, processes, and work environment optimize the experiences of an enterprise’s software developers as they work. And the new Kalix experience provides four key elements that deliver developer productivity and software development velocity, leading to faster development and business value delivery. These include the Kalix Workflows, Kalix Container Registry, Kalix Control Tower, and a host of new DX functionality.
This new component in the Kalix ecosystem eliminates one of the biggest challenges in a microservice architecture—business processes that span multiple services or steps and might require varying compensating flows. And as a result, it enables developers at any level of expertise to handle complex business processes quickly.
Through the new Container Registry feature, Kalix automatically sets up the container registry for the user. And users can run one command to deploy their code to Kalix. In addition, the Kalix Container registry resides within the Kalix ecosystem. Residing in a fully managed environment results in a more stable, reliable, and easier-to-manage container registry than customer-managed Container Registries.
For existing Kalix customers, the container registry becomes one less thing to manage while simultaneously also being more reliable. And this solution also delivers more control for compliance reasons or for those enterprises that wish to maintain their container registry.
Kalix Control Tower gives customers real-time transparency and visibility into applications and services running on Kalix. And Control Tower can be broken down broadly into two categories: Monitoring and Metrics. Kalix monitors all services and reports the metrics of every component and functionality of a service. It covers metrics ranging from health to performance to billing. This gives the customers full visibility into their Kalix Services.
Kalix has implemented multiple new capabilities that, when taken together, dramatically make developers’ lives easier. And Kalix now has an all-platform proxy image structure delivering a 6x improvement in testing time and also supports emulators to test Integrations like Brokers (Kafka) and Kalix service-to-service (S2S) eventing. This means developers can test external brokers and S2S eventing without any effort.
These examples include auto-discovery, auto-reconnect, and startup of the Kalix proxy, which means that the user doesn’t have to do any Kalix-specific configuration. They write their own business logic as a service and run it.
KEY QUOTE:
“As the industry continues its transition to cloud native infrastructure, DX has become a critical element for every organization. Kalix now offers the optimal developer experience, and also, an entirely new virtual trial experience enables developers to realize the efficiency, velocity, and reliability Kalix delivers in mere minutes.”
— Jonas Bonér, Lightbend’s founder and CEO
