Hey,
Somebody recently told me, “you only speak about platform engineering and golden paths in general, you don’t actually explain how to do it!”
Many think that a golden path is paved if a developer can use a CLI which calls a Terraform file to create an S3 bucket. That’s short sighted. It’s a brief relief, but this S3 bucket is still going to take on a life of its own and silently drift into Nirvana.
Great golden paths require Dynamic Configuration Management to generate app and infra configs with every deployment. Every day is day zero, every deployment is on the golden path. I wrote this article to explain how to build golden paths and enable Dynamic Configuration Management using Score and Humanitec’s Platform Orchestrator. The article describes how this works in detail. But first let me quickly show you just how delightful the developer experience is!
Let’s assume the following: You’re a developer, you have a workload which now needs a new MySQL Database. You first want to deploy to dev, so here’s what you do.
- Open your Score file (a workload specification that describes workloads and their dependencies in an environment agnostic way).
- Add the following lines to the file:
resources:
db:
type: mysql
- git-push
Done! Humanitec’s Platform Orchestrator has dynamically created app and infrastructure resources for you. Your workload now has a new MySQL database that’s up, running, and fully wired up. But how do you tweak this, and how do you influence the configs and what happened? Read on for the answers.
Now the configs are super clean and standardized, you get all the granularity but with close to zero cognitive load. Nice, isn’t it? Let’s take it to the next level, aking the same workload and launching a new environment.
- Humctl create env –ephemeral
- Environment running!
Because configs are created dynamically, the Orchestrator read the Score file and created app and infra resources, created the resources and deployed them. Awesome.
Dynamically creating configs has so many advantages. For example there are 95% less config files to maintain and understand, isn’t that something? The future is dynamic and Humanitec is proud to support your journey into that future.
Join our webinar for more information on how to nail Dynamic Configuration Management, and learn how to reduce config complexity by up to 95% (as measured by the # of files our team has to maintain).
Hope you have a wonderful day!
Kaspar
