WG - Unified Dev Service - Brainstorming

[cescoffier]

Earlier this week, a few of us (see participant list below) met to discuss the future of Dev Services. We had a productive one-hour brainstorming session to explore what could be the next “big thing” in this area.

Four key observations prompted this initiative:
* We’ve received repeated requests for Dev Service orchestration — a feature we’ve historically avoided.
* Slow start times and the inability to reuse Dev Services between run, dev, and test modes significantly degrade the developer experience, especially when running individual tests.
* While working on test classloading, Holly noticed that Dev Services are being started during the augmentation phase, even though they are actually runtime entities.
* Ozan recently added support for Docker Compose, enabling the startup of a set of containers as Dev Services — a major step forward that partially addresses orchestration needs.

Given these signals, it was the right time to consolidate our thoughts and explore ways to improve Dev Services.

The outcome of the session is captured in the following diagram:

We used the session to gather and cluster ideas. While the clustering isn’t perfect, we identified a few high-priority items, particularly around the Dev Service lifecycle. We aim to build a dedicated working group to further pursue this effort.

Participants:

• @maxandersen
• @geoand
• @cescoffier
• @ozangunalp
• @vsevel
• @xstefank
• @holly-cummins (not present but pushed ideas before the meeting)
• @radcortez (not present but pushed ideas before the meeting)

[edeandrea]

I raised #dev > Creating dev services this morning and was directed here. I'm glad to see that there is some initiative.

If I could add 1 more observation (the TL;DR; from that Zulip thread) - Creating a dev service involves a lot of "noise" - code I need to write which really has nothing to do with the container I'm trying to expose. Noise that seems to be copy/pasted into each dev service processor class. You can read the thread for an example/full details if you wish.

I'm happy to be involved too. I may not have complete understanding of everything under the hood, but I do have some ideas, albeit they may not be completely thought through :)

[cescoffier]

@ozangunalp tried to define a better API a few years back but realized that every container was actually special.

@ozangunalp do you remember your observation?