Airbnb: This HXC is invested in being a good global citizen, and doesn’t want to simply visit new places but to belong. “It’s the guest who wants to ‘live like a local’ and experience Paris as if they are living there,” says Supan. “They’re energized by the idea of staying in unique spaces and feeling welcomed, but are cost-conscious, too.”Startups like Airbnb that build a two-sided marketplace—guests and hosts, riders and drivers, buyers and sellers, etc.—may be wrangling twice the people, but their process for identifying the HXC doesn’t actually look that different. “The company does have to take a position. While Airbnb will say consistently that the hosts are their business—and that is true—the position of the company is toward the guest. It's about belonging,” says Supan.But there’s no rivalry there; hosts relate to that position. “They, too, want to open their homes to learn about different cultures, and increase their income to be more self-reliant. They understand who Airbnb’s guest is and want to welcome them,” says Supan. “And, many hosts are also Airbnb guests, which is typical of marketplaces where the top sellers can also be the top buyers. Messaging, in these cases, may change depending on which side of the marketplace you’re talking to, but your positioning should not.”

A VPN connection or an AWS Direct Connect connection to a corporate network

Separate Clusters. It is probably most common to see multiple clusters being deployed. This is due to different reasons, with security focused network segmentation being only one of them. Security focused. Application workloads with different security protection levels can be separated by Kubernetes clusters. This makes isolating traffic easier by using traditional firewalls or VPCs to prevent cross-cluster communication. If connections between clusters are required then it can be manually allowed but management can become cumbersome and error prone. For example, one cluster runs the application workloads and a separate one running databases, file storage (such as S3/minio) and other persistent storage for the same project because different security profiles are required for each cluster.

Note: Building a container image using docker build on-cluster is very unsafe and is shown here only as a demonstration. Use kaniko instead.

Coordination: More environments require more coordination. Teams need to track which feature is deployed to which environment. Bugs need to be associated with environments. Every environment represents a particular ‘state’ of the codebase, and this has to be tracked somewhere to make sure that customers & stakeholders are seeing the right things;

GitOps doesn’t provide a solution to propagating changes from one stage to the next one. We recommend using only a single environment and avoid stage propagation altogether. But if you need multiple stages (e.g., DEV, QA, PROD, etc.) with an environment for each, you need to handle the propagation outside of the GitOps scope, for example by some CI/CD pipeline.

In our review of engagement issues, the first area we found is the importance of simple, clear goals. When people have clearly defined goals that are written down and shared freely, everyone feels more comfortable, and more work gets done. Goals create alignment, clarity, and job satisfaction—and they have to be revisited and discussed regularly.

What a lot of people don't realize is that a source control system is a communication tool. It allows Scarlett to see what other people on the team are doing. With frequent integrations, not just is she alerted right away when there are conflicts, she's also more aware of what everyone is up to, and how the codebase is evolving. We're less like individuals hacking away independently and more like a team working together.