FAQs

Humanitec drives developer productivity by radically simplifying how you deliver software. Our customers see 4x higher deployment frequency, 75% less Ops overhead, and 30% faster lead time. Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) built with our Platform Orchestrator are truly enterprise-grade and take a fraction of the time and resources to get up and running. Every one of our customers successfully rolled out their platform in weeks vs months or years and reported an 87% developer NPS. That’s because developers love platforms built with Humanitec and Score. They can choose their preferred interface (code based with Score, UI, CLI or API) and easily self-serve the tech and tools they need, without waiting times. Platform teams using the Platform Orchestrator can standardize the way app and infra configs are generated and managed, across all teams.

As a platform/operations engineer

Humanitec’s product philosophy is that developers should be able to self-serve all the tech and tools they need in a standardized way. 

The Platform Orchestrator ensures standardization by design across infrastructure provisioning and app config management. It enables you to build your enterprise-grade Internal Developer Platform (IDP) fast and empowers teams with true developer self-service. This resolves key issues such as being flooded with tickets and Slack messages, DevOps burnout, and Ops bottlenecks. The result? Less time spent on maintenance and serving developers. No more worrying about security violations. And more time to focus on key business metrics—such as slashing time to market (TTM). 

As a developer

Humanitec frees developers from having to wait for help from Ops. Our open-source workload specification, Score, enables developers to request the resources their workload depends on in a declarative way. Developers love Score because they can run the same workload on completely different technology stacks, without needing to be an expert in any one of them. There’s no context-switching, and it’s easy to learn. With Score, developers no longer have to fight a bunch of tech and tools when promoting workloads from local to production, and can focus more on writing and deploying code. 

Previously complex tasks like adding new resources, changing configs, or rollbacks can be executed with a simple git-push or a single click in the UI. This helps increase deployment frequency, drives developer satisfaction, and reduces waiting times. And with the Platform Orchestrator, onboarding a new developer to a delivery setup takes less than 30 minutes. 

As a manager

An IDP powered by the Platform Orchestrator can remove Ops bottlenecks and enable true developer self-service. This helps boost developer experience and productivity, which results in the ability to slash TTM, drive revenue growth, and respond faster to a competitive landscape. On average, we see a 400% increase in deployment frequency and 50% less Ops overhead for organizations using the Platform Orchestrator. And for a team of seven developers, Humanitec saves, on average, 53 hours a week of wait times, manual tasks, and toil. When it comes to TCO, building an enterprise-grade IDP with Humanitec is cheaper and faster than rebuilding everything in-house. In fact, engineering teams using the Platform Orchestrator have reported up to 80% lower TCO. Want proof? We’ll happily run you through an ROI calculation tailored to your organization.

Using Score, an OSS workload specification, developers describe how their apps fit together and define which resources they depend on. The Humanitec Platform Orchestrator then revolves these requests against the baseline configs set by the platform team. With every git-push, the Platform Orchestrator interprets what resources and configs are required for a workload to run. It creates app and infrastructure configs based on rules defined by the platform team and executes them based on a “Read”-”Match”-”Create”-”Deploy” pattern:

• Read: Interpret workload specification and context
• Match: Identify the correct config baselines to create app configs and define resources to resolve or create, based on the matching context 
• Create: Create app configs; if necessary create (infrastructure) resources, fetch credentials, and inject credentials as secrets
• Deploy: Deploy the workload into the target environment wired up to its dependencies

In this way, the Platform Orchestrator enables developers to self-serve all the tech and tools they need to work more efficiently, while eliminating ticket ops and Ops bottlenecks.

After having architected, built, and observed hundreds of platforms, we created several reference architectures based on setups across public, private, and hybrid cloud. Below is a snapshot from a reference architecture for an AWS ecosystem, showing what an IDP built with Humanitec’s products would look like. As you can see, the diagram shows five main planes that make up the platform reference architecture. It’s important to remember that while the components and tools are based on an AWS-based setup all can be changed, and similar reference architectures can be used for GCP, Azure, OpenShift, or any hybrid setup. 

These reference architectures are designed to help you build your IDP quickly and reliably. To see what an IDP on your specific cloud setup looks like, check out the individual reference architectures available as whitepapers.

Building an IDP with the Humanitec Platform Orchestrator offers several advantages. There’s no need to change your existing CI/CD setup and by integrating with the Platform Orchestrator, you can build an enterprise-grade dynamic IDP with greater speed and reliability. You can also enhance your platform’s self-service capabilities, streamline the development process, and ultimately improve your organization's productivity and lead time. Key benefits include:

• Standardization by design: The Platform Orchestrator enables platform engineers to standardize and automate infrastructure provisioning and config management, and developers to focus on delivering apps. This leads to improved collaboration, increased velocity, reduced infrastructure sprawl and less cognitive load.
• Dynamic Configuration Management: The Platform Orchestrator enables Dynamic Configuration Management (DCM), a methodology used to structure the configuration of compute workloads. Developers create workload specifications, describing everything their workloads need to run successfully. This results in standardization of configuration and separation of concerns, along with a better developer experience (DevEx) and new possibilities for working.
• Greater security and compliance: With the Platform Orchestrator developers can regularly vend standardized versions of infrastructure and configs. This helps reduce the risk of human error and ensures compliance and consistency across environments and infrastructure. 
• Better DevEx: An IDP built with Humanitec's products can reduce the complexity developers face when building and operating their apps, allowing them to focus on writing code and delivering features.

By integrating the Platform Orchestrator with your CI/CD setup, you can leverage the full benefits of an IDP while maintaining your existing tools and processes.

The Platform Orchestrator integrates with your current CI/CD setup in a few ways. It receives build notifications from your CI pipeline with every deployment. Typically, this is done through a curl or wget command that can be added to the last step of the build pipeline. The command allows the Platform Orchestrator to know about all available builds and can then be used in your apps. This is also the starting point for further automation. 

The integration to cloud providers and resources is done through Drivers. Integrations with dedicated CD systems e.g. ArgoCD are also possible, documentation for this is being released soon. And since the Platform Orchestrator is designed as “API-first”, the API can be used to integrate with developer portals, service catalogs, or value stream management systems.

If you have your own container registry, you simply need to inform Humanitec about new builds. This can be done by adding a curl or wget request to the end of your existing CI pipeline. If you don’t have your own, we also offer a hosted registry. And in terms of network connectivity, the Platform Orchestrator can connect to your network directly by using bastion hosts or IP whitelisting. You can also write your own integration for our tool with any CI pipeline, or even use it from a terminal on your local machine.

The Platform Orchestrator is designed to integrate with your existing Kubernetes (K8s) clusters wherever they’re hosted. You can configure our tool to run your app in a single K8s cluster or across different clusters in a multi-cloud setup, with an all-in-one solution to manage what’s running and where. Humanitec has integrated support for all major public cloud providers as well as vanilla K8s out-of-the-box.

Whatever your integration needs, Drivers can be used to implement the Platform Orchestrator, establish connections to your infrastructure, and create and/or update infrastructure resources. With Drivers you can connect to different cloud providers such as AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure. While the Terraform Driver provides enough flexibility for most other cases.

For more information on integrating Humanitec with your CI/CD pipeline, check out the official documentation.

In the context of the Platform Orchestrator, Resources refer to elements consumed or used by a Workload or another Resource. They can be infrastructure-based, like an AWS S3 bucket, or logical, such as AWS IAM Policies. During deployment, Humanitec identifies the Resource types needed to fulfil Resource dependencies. For each identified Resource dependency, a corresponding Resource Definition is chosen. This determines the Driver to be used for Resource provisioning. The Placeholders outputs provided by the Resource types are then utilized to incorporate the Driver’s output into the Workload. Head to our blog for more information on how to configure Resources in Humanitec, so they get provisioned by the platform exactly how your team needs them to.

Application configuration management with Humanitec is strictly YAML-based. While today you probably touch a file and apply manual changes every time you need to update configs, with Humanitec you define baseline workload profiles once, and let engineers work against those. Developers use our OSS workload specification Score (YAML based) to describe what their workload needs in order to run (e.g. a Postgres database). The Platform Orchestrator reads the request and matches it against the baseline defined by the platform team. It then creates the necessary resources (or connects to existing ones) and deploys (or hands over to an existing deployment solution, e.g. ArgoCD).

This approach to config management drives standardization by design along your entire app config lifecycle and across all your teams. For Ops teams it’s very easy to maintain and for developers, it’s easy to work with. You can easily port current Helm charts by simply porting the environment variables and container configs. Migrating a Helm chart should take roughly ten minutes (depending on complexity).

Absolutely. Get in touch and we’ll happily help set this up.

Yes, but only in the enterprise tier and exclusively on GKE, EKS, or AKS clusters.

The Humanitec Platform Orchestrator is currently being used in four continents and makes sense for organizations with several teams dependent on a central Ops function. We usually see Platform Orchestrator used by organizations with a minimum of 50 developers, those with an average of 150 developers, and large enterprises with over 1000 developers.

The Humanitec Platform Orchestrator is usually introduced and POC’d by the platform or cloud Ops team. But the Platform Orchestrator is a game-changer for developers too, especially when paired with Score. Score is an OSS workload specification that allows developers to describe their workloads and dependencies as code once—and run them across all environments. Together, Score and the Platform Orchestrator enable true developer self-service, reducing lead time and killing waiting times for developers.

Since the Platform Orchestrator ensures that the correct resources are provisioned and wired to the workload, any developer who wants to get involved in the infrastructure domain can do so. Even those with a low level of infrastructure skills can quickly onboard to any infrastructure and be productive. In this way, complexity is optional vs imposed, and developers are freed to focus on what they love; writing and shipping code. 

We recommend you always include developers in the decision-making process. For help selling to your developer team or colleagues, please get in touch.

This depends on the key initiatives your C-level are concerned about. When presenting your Humanitec business case, it’s important to frame your argument around your management’s biggest business priorities. This means tailoring your message to address the specific outcomes that the business currently requires. 

For example, one key metric likely to be top of their agenda is time to market (TTM). So here you could talk about how an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) built with the Platform Orchestrator reduces complexity for developers when building and operating their apps. Developers can self-serve all the tech and tools they need which reduces time wasted waiting on Ops. This boosts developer and Ops productivity, which in turn speeds up innovation cycles and shortens TTM. Removing such friction and bottlenecks from the software delivery process also improves developer experience, which 77% of DevOps leaders say results in a shorter TTM time to market while 85% report a positive impact on revenue growth.

In terms of selling Humanitec from a cost perspective, an IDP makes it easier to manage your setup with greater efficiency. Small changes such as being able to detect and pause unused environments can also reduce costs. And when it comes to building the Platform Orchestrator’s functionality yourself, this equates to at least four times our license cost. Feel free to reach out and we’ll happily provide an individual ROI assessment. Or head to our ROI calculator for an instant quote.

We offer a free community version that you can test with no limitations. Testing the Platform Orchestrator alone is like testing a motor without a car (the car being the platform). So you can test both motor and car, we’ve created reference architectures setup as "platform as code". We’re currently open-sourcing them, but you can still get access by booking a demo. We also run guided POC sessions where we’ll work with you to set up a reference architecture. This takes around three hours with our platform architects and is completely free. Afterwards you get to test the platform together with the Platform Orchestrator on your own with a free 45 day trial.