How a Cloud Development Environment Stops Software Bug Infiltration
With all due respect to the greatest film of all time "Starship Troopers," software bugs are much scarier than alien arachnids. And killing them early can improve software quality. The sooner a bug is found, the less time it has had to cause damage. On the other hand, a bug found late in the development process or in production may have caused extensive problems that will be very difficult and expensive to fix. Studies show that the cost of finding a bug in production versus development can be 10X higher.
One of the problems in this Kubernetes world is the typical complexity of a modern cloud-native application makes it often impossible for developers working on local machines to run the microservice they wish to code and debug. The reason is that local development impedes access to cluster dependencies, such as databases, infrastructure, queues, SSO, and other custom microservices. Mocking all these dependencies can be very time-consuming and challenging to maintain.
Local development also leads to an increase in bugs because local dev — unlike a cloud dev environment — does not mirror production, causing developers to fly blind in the dark when predicting what unpleasant surprises might pop up later. When bugs are discovered in production, coupled with an application not functioning or meeting critical security requirements, developers must scrap and rework significant parts of code. Starting over from scratch is costly, causing development delays, production bottlenecks, and blown budgets.
Kubernetes Development Environment Helped Homa Games Reduce 80% of Bugs
In the case of Homa Games, the mobile game company's tech leader Sergej Bitenc turned to Okteto’s cloud development platform as bug insecticide. So why did the world’s leading mobile game developer company choose Okteto over competing solutions? Okteto wasn’t just the best choice - it was the only choice.
According to Sergej, "there simply was no other cloud development solution available." "We couldn't find a solution that wouldn't involve running all microservices locally and setting it up, and since business can't start those up, they would just skip the testing phase until it was on stage."
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With Okteto's Kubernetes development environment, Homa Games' developer team could test code before merging, allowing QA to catch bugs early. This saved the company time and money by avoiding building on a shaky dev foundation and reworking code down the road.
"We use Okteto to ensure that our product is bug-free and ready to release. We use it on all branches before they merge to staging or master to test the functionality," says Sergej. "This enables us to spin up instances with specific code changes and let QA and product test our changes, without needing technical knowledge of compiling and presenting the code. Okteto reduced our bugs by a whopping 80%.”
Catching Bugs Early Saves Money and Keeps Developers Focused
Using a cloud-based Kubernetes development environment to catch bugs earlier saves money in ways managers often overlook: it keeps development teams focused on innovating and creating code. Developers who stumble upon a bug often stop their work and question if they should fix it before commencing or continuing development, or maybe they stop to investigate if perhaps it was fixed but not checked in. Either way, bugs are a distraction that impedes developer velocity.
Early detection of bugs can also help prevent potential security vulnerabilities that can result in breaches and problems ranging from costly repair time to brand damage.
Bugs will happen, especially if you have an innovative developer organization. But the key is to catch bugs backstage before migrating to a live production environment for users to see. A remote, cloud development allows organizations to "shift left" and involve DevOps and QA teams early in development to catch bugs before production and eliminate last-minute patches and code fixes. Okteto helps development teams find and kill bugs fast.