Lightbend, the company providing cloud-native microservices frameworks for some of the world’s largest brands, today 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 today’s announcement, Lightbend has revamped its Kalix experience with new capabilities across all phases of the developer’s journey, including development, test, deployment, and insight into the health and performance of applications and services running on Kalix.
“As the industry continues its transition to cloud native infrastructure, DX has become a critical element for every organization,” said Jonas Bonér, Lightbend’s founder and CEO. “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.”
The DX experience that today’s high-performing organizations strive for ensures the tools, processes, and work environment optimize the experiences of an enterprise’s software developers as they carry out their work. The new Kalix experience provides four key elements that deliver developer productivity and software development velocity that lead 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.
Kalix Workflows
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. As a result, it enables developers at any level of expertise to handle complex business processes easily.
Kalix Container Registry
With the new Container Registry feature, Kalix automatically sets up the container registry for the user. 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 being more reliable. This solution also delivers more control for compliance reasons or for those enterprises that wish to maintain their own container registry.
Kalix Control Tower
Kalix Control Tower gives customers real-time transparency and visibility into applications and services running on Kalix. Control Tower can be broken down broadly into 2 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.
Multiple DX Improvements
Kalix has implemented multiple new capabilities that, when taken together, dramatically make developers' lives easier. Kalix now has an all-platform proxy image structure delivering a 6x improvement in testing time and also now 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.
Examples include auto-discovery, auto-reconnect, and startup of the Kalix proxy, which means that the user now doesn’t have to do any Kalix-specific configuration. They simply write their own business logic as a service and run it.
About Kalix
Kalix (@Kalix.io) is a PaaS developed by Lightbend that enables organizations to quickly build and deploy event-driven microservices and APIs at the lowest possible cost. It provides an “out of the box” cloud native stack that delivers a 200% increase in developer velocity with minimal operations required. Kalix is a dramatic advancement over the existing serverless model and in abstracting development complexity, as it provides a unifying application layer that pulls together the necessary pieces—including databases, message brokers, caches, services meshes, API gateways, —and exposes them into one single unified programming model and DX tailored for the cloud and edge. Kalix and its Serverless DX let developers focus on the essence of value creation: building direct end-user and business value that leaves us with a coherent, understandable, predictable, and maintainable system, all managed from the cloud.
Kalix builds on the lessons we have learned from more than a decade of building Akka (leveraging the actor model) and our experience helping large (and small) enterprises move to the cloud and use it in the most time, cost, and resource-efficient way possible. This newly enhanced Kalix Experience is available today, and more details can be found in our latest blog post here. Interested parties can find out complete service details and more here - kalix.io
About Lightbend
Lightbend (@Lightbend) is leading the enterprise transformation toward real-time, cloud-native applications and setting the standard for cloud-native architectures. Lightbend provides scalable, high-performance microservices frameworks and streaming engines for building data-centric systems that are optimized to run on cloud-native infrastructure. Lightbend powers the world’s most innovative companies. For more information, visit www.lightbend.com.