KuboDevelop™

When developing cloud native applications and in particular microservices as part of the larger application, it is not uncommon for developers to be left to start these from scratch. This is particularly true of newly formed teams or teams just starting out on their cloud native journey.

The result is that developers often find themselves spending a good portion of their time on many non-functional aspects of a microservice not related to the business logic of the feature they are tasked with developing. How do they handle instrumentation? What kinds of test coverage needs to be dealt with? How do they take care of security concerns? What about the DevOps pipelines? How do they get started?

In less mature teams, the approach of individual developers can vary, leading to inconsistent and unpredictable levels of quality. Even in more seasoned teams with good collaboration, well defined processes and clear definition of done, these non-functional requirements can be time consuming.

KuboCode™ kickstarter projects aim to provide widely accepted options, on a development language/framework basis, to handle much of the non-functional work needed when developing microservices. This allows developers to focus most of their time on the business logic and related algorithms of the microservice they are tasked with. The result is that teams should be able to move at a faster velocity with more consistent high quality outcomes.

KuboCode™ consists of a set of well documented microservices projects across multiple supported development languages and frameworks. These can be used as kick starter projects (think of them as microservice skeletons or building blocks) enabling a developer to rapidly spin up everything required so that they can start writing business logic. 

These starter microservices projects include:

• Full documentation on how to leverage a starter project, including how to build, test, debug and run locally
• Support for NodeJS Express, Java Spring Boot, Python Flask projects
• Support for error handling and validation of API contracts using open api specifications.
• Support for downstream persistent stores – both RDBMS and NoSQL including MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB and Couchbase
• Starter projects handle code coverage and quality, unit and integration testing frameworks, documentation, observability and security concerns
• Pre-built CI/CD pipeline including build, quality, test, security, report, publish and deployment stages.
• A comprehensive set of software bill of materials consisting of external open source tools and libraries used along with their license models.

KuboCode™ also handles the concept of creating templates that allows developers to take existing starter projects, extend or modify them or create their own and add them to the collection for use by other developers within their team or different teams within the organization. This promotes re-use and consistency within and across teams.

One of our core principles and beliefs at Kubozoa is to eliminate waste in everything we do. For over two decades we have observed software development in many companies and it has shown us that even with the best of intentions and with the adoption of APIs and open source projects, far too many development teams are still recreating solutions to problem statements that have already been solved.

As we continue to evolve as a company, we want to minimize the time spent in these types of activities ourselves and we want to share and promote reuse for all of our customers too.

KuboLib™ is a continually expanding library of reusable functions, utility packages and production grade microservices that are commonly used in applications, reducing the time needed to develop and promoting reusability.

Examples of reusable library functions within KuboLib™ include logger, access logger, sensitive data encryption and dependency injection for things needed in all microservices such as authentication using JWTs, trace IDs, trusted headers, response time and APM. 

Currently our library support is for projects written using NodeJS Express, Java Spring Boot & Python Flask.

An example service is ‘Boxy’ which is a simple HTTP echo service primarily used for testing reachability, demonstrating service deployments and assisting with debugging and identifying connectivity & routing issues.

KuboLib™ will continue to expand over time further promoting reuse, consistent quality and faster time to market.