From the moment of their inception as source code on the developer’s laptop, our hero knows that they are destined for great things. They long to be a real, running application, living in production, serving end users! But the epic journey to production is an arduous one, filled with cascading choices—choices concerning app design, testing, security, container image building, deployment strategy, and observability, to name a few. And who knows what other unseen forces lurk in the shadows! One wrong step could be catastrophic.

It is up to us, the audience, to guide our hero; and to help them grow from source code to container image, to their final form as a running application in production. In this ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’-style journey, Whitney and Viktor will present a linear view of all of the choices that an anthropomorphized application must make as they try to find their way to the fabled land of production. Throughout the trek, the audience will vote to choose which path our hero application will take. Can we navigate CNCF projects and avoid pitfalls and dead-ends to get our application to production?