KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2024

Multi-tier programming is a classic concept from the programming languages community, which provides abstractions for building multiple layers of a distributed application at once. For example, there might be a “presentation” tier that displays a user interface, a “data” tier that interacts with a backing database, and a “business logic” tier that connects the two, all of which can be expressed succinctly as part of the same program and compiled into independently-deployable units. However, Kubernetes has pushed modern software development in the opposite direction: SOA applications are composed of hundreds of independent units of code, often written in different languages and development environments. In this talk we provide an overview of multi-tier programming and how it might apply to software development on Kubernetes. We also present a prototype “Kubernetes compiler” that can turn a monolithic codebase into a distributed application that runs on top of Kubernetes.