Okteto Bring Your Own Cloud

What do you like best about the product?

We had an internal development team maintaining our preview environments that we spin up for automated tests in CI. The previews never worked exactly the way we wanted and the took our engineers away from what they needed to be focused on: our product! We switched over Okteto Enterprise and couldn't be happier. We use Okteto to automaticall spin up the environments using their GitHub Action whenever pull requests are created. The automated tests run against the environments in the cloud and are torn down the the testing process completes. If we need to make an environment stay active longer, we add a custom label to the PR and the environment will stay active until the PR is closed. The whole process is great and we never have to worry about it. It just works.

What do you dislike about the product?

This wasn't an issue for us, but to use the enterprise version you need to install it in our infra. However, it's pretty easy to do.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Okteto allowed us to outsource preview environments and freed up our engineering time to work on higher priroities.

What do you like best about the product?

It just improves the developer experience tremendously. It requires a bit of effort to setup depending on your specific usecase but after that it saves the developers a lot of frustration and time. It means that when you onboard a developer, he basically only needs to install a cli tool and run 2 commands and he/she will have full access to a fully configured dev environment that also closely mirrors production. The developer will not have to spend any time on configuring architecture or secrets, benefitting security as well.

Additionally okteto makes it easy to deploy previews or run test containers in production like environments. It integrates with CI/CD quite easily and the support has been excellent so far.

What do you dislike about the product?

We create k8 namespaces dynamically and okteto doesn't manage those currently. There are work arounds but they will come with trade-offfs. Additionally currently there is no way (as far as I am aware) to connect and develop with k8 jobs.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Its abstracting away the complexity of setting up a dev environment for a micro services like architecture. It means the developer can focus on writing business logic for his particular field instead of having to learn all kinds of things to be even able to deploy the product. What I also like is it offers the possibility of setting up a complete dev experience for your developer, with tools installed, secret configured and so on, so the developer can dive right in and benefit from the experience of the entire team that configure this together.

This all improves the experience but also development velocity a lot.

What do you like best about the product?

Okteto enables me to spin up new development environments with the click of a button. I can easily switch between different development or testing environments to develop or test different features (or bug fixes). In each environment I can deploy different combinations of branches for the microservices that make up our application. Additionally each environment can contain the specific test data that I need for developing a specific feature. When I need to work on an other feature temporarily I simply switch to the other environment while my current environment continues to exist.

When a new feature is ready for review one of our QA people can test directly in the existing environment. No need for a tester to spin up a separate testing environment (alhouth depending on your workflow you might want to spin up a new preview environment for QA, which is perfectly possible with Okteto as well).

What do you dislike about the product?

Not much really. It works just great for me.

The only thing is that, depending on your experience with remote development and on your IDE, it might take some time to set it up properly for remote development. But at least for VS code and PyCharm there are great guides and plugins that make it really easy.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

As mentioned before, Okteto enables us to set up new development environment with a single click of a button. Additionally it let's us have multipe development and/or testing environments at the same time and makes it very easy to switch between these environments.

It saves us a lot of time because we do not have to switch between local development environments when working on different features. Also it enables a great onboarding experience for new developers.

What do you like best about the product?

Okteto provides a very comprehensive solution for managing our Docker containers used in pre-merge testing, with extensive environment visibility and management as well as user access controls. It provides a modern, smooth, easy-to-use interface. Beyond the tool is the fantastic, personalized support and engagement from the Okteto team.

With it's great GitHub integration, we use Okteto to spin up a test environment (both automated and manual testing is possible) for every PR in multiple repos used in our project. This provides a controlled environment with main-branch functionality from related repos plus changes from the specific PR. The environments sleep automatically to conserve resources and tear down automatically once a PR is merged.

We've also used Okteto to provide a short-term demo environment for salespeople when the functionality is not yet ready for prime time, but can be made available for demo.

All-in-all it's a very useful tool with a great support team.

What do you dislike about the product?

There is occasionally the need to adapt our Docker files for upcoming changes to Okteto, but the team is good about giving plenty of notice, and working with us when we've needed more time.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We might be able to create Docker containers to handle some of the same things we do with Okteto, but the visibility and orchestration would be much less robust and there would be virtually no user-level controls on access, and likely much higher compute resource utilization.

What do you like best about the product?

Katana has evolved beyond the limitations of traditional local development environments, where the entire ecosystem was once hosted on a single PC or localhost setup. Today, engineers can spin up specific environments tailored to the areas of the product they need to work on, significantly improving development efficiency and reducing resource overhead.

Our partnership with Okteto has been key in this transformation. The collaboration with Okteto has been seamless, with their team consistently going above and beyond to provide guidance and support. Their proactive approach and dedication to customer success has been noticeable.

As an early adopter of Okteto, I want to extend a special thanks to Pablo, whose ongoing support and expertise have been invaluable in helping us scale and optimize our development processes over the years.

What do you dislike about the product?

As with most products, hope to get more capabilities into Oktetos roadmap that would unlock growth and enable efficiency.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Simplification of development environment setup.