It’s easy to get comfortable with the tools we know. For the longest time, Kubernetes Ingress and standard Jenkins freestyle jobs were my bread and butter. But today was about breaking out of that comfort zone and looking at the next generation of infrastructure management.
My day was split between two distinct but critical areas of DevOps: exploring the future of Kubernetes networking and getting my hands dirty with Jenkins pipeline-as-code.
The Gateway to Better Networking
I finally dove into the Kubernetes Gateway API. If you’ve been using standard Ingress resources, you know the pain points: annotation sprawl, non-standard implementations, and the difficulty of splitting responsibilities between cluster operators and application developers.
The Gateway API feels like the mature successor we’ve been waiting for. What stood out to me today was the role-oriented design. The separation of GatewayClass, Gateway, and HTTPRoute resources means:
Cluster Ops manage the infrastructure (Load Balancers).
Developers manage the routing logic.
It’s cleaner, more expressive, and honestly, a relief to see standard portable features that used to require vendor-specific annotations.
Wrangling Jenkins Pipelines
The second half of my day was spent in the trenches of CI/CD. I moved away from UI-configured jobs to building robust Jenkins Pipelines (Jenkinsfiles).
There is something satisfying about committing your build logic alongside your application code. I focused on a declarative pipeline structure today, setting up stages for Build, Test, and a conditional Deploy. Debugging Groovy syntax can be tricky, but the visibility you get from the stage view makes it worth it.
Takeaway
Today reinforced that our ecosystem is constantly moving toward “Configuration as Data.” Whether it’s routing traffic in K8s or defining build steps in Jenkins, explicit, version-controlled configuration is the only way forward.
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dasari-jayanth-b32ab9367/
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