Microservices and distributed systems in general are often deployed on a platform such as Kubernetes, which orchestrates the deployment and management of containerized applications. Microservices, however, don't exist in a vacuum. They typically communicate with other services, such as databases, message brokers, other microservices, or even AI models. This distributedness makes it hard for you to do local/inner-loop development and test efficiently.

In this talk, you will learn about some potential solutions you can use to help tackle some of these challenges by either running services locally in a more efficient way or by interacting with external dependencies/systems remotely.

You should come away from this session with some new ideas on how to work with distributed applications using technologies such as Docker Compose, Podman Desktop, Podman AI Lab, TestContainers, Quarkus, LangChain4j, Remote Development, Skupper, and Eclipse JKube.

You’ve all been there, haven’t you? You are developing an application that needs to connect to something else in order to function properly, yet you can’t (or don’t want to) run that “something else” on your local developer laptop. What are some of the tools and technologies that could help in this situation?