As more companies embrace the cloud, the role of the developer has changed. Coding is no longer a siloed operation, but a broad, highly collaborative and complex group effort.

“No application is built in a closet,” said Donnie Berkholz (pictured), vice president of products at Docker Inc. “Every single application that is built is built in partnership with other developers, with product managers, with designers, all of these people who need to somehow work together to review not only the source code, but the application as a whole.”

Berkholz spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during DockerCon. They discussed the increasing acceleration of DevOps and how collaboration, containerization and trust can help build better products faster. (*Disclosure below.)

Collaboration and trust amid widespread disruption

The past few years have seen a wave of digital disruption. As part of this trend, companies are looking for interoperable, multifunctional cloud applications that can serve the needs of all their end users. The developers that have succeeded in meeting this need have adopted a similar cross-functional approach to development.

“That’s the big shift that I think has been in the works for probably a decade at this point … that kind of rotation of responsibilities,” Berkholz said. “It used to be that devs owned the dev environment … and ops owned prod and everything about prod. And now … there are platforms that span every environment, and there’s a platform team responsible for each one of those components.”

This highly collaborative, cross-functional development gives teams the agility to create these applications on time. As cloud environments have grown increasingly complex, especially with the onset of edge computing, building a consistent platform like this becomes all the more crucial. Collaboration on the development side leads to consistency for end users, and containerization helps push this further.

“Every company is going to be running in multiple different environments,” Berkholz emphasized. “Containers … solve part of that by providing a consistent platform that lets you take your applications from place to place, that lets you build a consistent set of expertise so that you know a container here is like a container there.”

With a consistent set of tools and communication across different teams, developers can meet the needs of a rapidly evolving market. Teams should extend their trust past their own co-workers too, according to Berkholz. There should be trust and collaboration between developers and customers as well.

“Almost every failure pattern that you see is one that happens because you’re not listening to your customers effectively,” he said. “It’s about understanding the customer’s needs and really making that something that is internalized in the way they think about. How do they solve problems? How do they design solutions?”

When teams can build trust with customers and co-workers, they create a better product and do so faster. As digital disruption increases, this communication will become increasingly vital, Berkholz concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of DockerCon. (* Disclosure: Docker Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Docker nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE