Update 2020-11-30: Added link to Part 2 of this series

What is Shipwright? Which problems does this project try to solve?

In Part 1 of this series, we’ll look back at the history of delivering software applications, and how that has changed in the age of Kubernetes and cloud-native development.

In Part 2 of this series, we’ll introduce Shipwright and the Build APIs that make it simple to build container images on Kubernetes.

Delivering Your Applications - A History

Think back to 2010. If you were a professional software engineer, a hobbyist, or a student, which tools and programming languages did you use? How did you package your applications? How did you or your team release software for end-users to consume?

Back then, I was a junior software engineer at a small technology consulting company. My team maintained a suite of custom software tools whose back-end was written in Java. Our release process consisted of creating a tag in our version control system (SVN), compiling a JAR file on our laptops, and uploading the JAR to our client’s SFTP site. After submitting a ticket and undergoing a change control review with our client’s IT department, our software would be released during a scheduled maintenance window.