The challenge
Overwhelmed developers or developers exposed to the wrong level of abstraction (too high or low) default to requesting help or resources from their Ops team. This results in highly qualified Op teams needing to bash through repetitive tickets, an activity called ticket ops. For Ops, this is simply draining and boring. It's also wildly unproductive. And while they’re kept busy, developers are waiting and distracted. It’s a lose-lose situation. Ops should instead be platform teams focused on improving and automating workflows.
Low lead times, high rollout failure rates, and frustrated developers are often the consequence.
How Humanitec products help you eliminate ticket ops
Enable developer self-service
By introducing a workload specification such as Score, you can allow developers to express everything their workload requires to run in a single file per workload. Whatever they need is just a key-stroke away. Once the request “I need a database of type Postgres” is added to a Score file, all that’s left to do is send it with a git-push through the CI Pipelines. It’ll then hit the Platform Orchestrator post-CI. Think of the Orchestrator like a ticket-elimination robot; it reads the request of the developer, matches the deployment context, and creates the app and infrastructure configs based on the defaults provided by the Ops/platform engineering team.
Reduce cognitive load through the right level of abstraction
Often ticket ops is a result of too much or too little abstraction. And the reality is that your team is diverse. Some developers want to go low-level into the last config file, while others want to stay high-level. The beauty of Humanitec’s approach is that both are possible. Developers that want to stay high-level and focus on their own business logic can use Score. Those that want to go down to the configuration of each app and infrastructure config file can still do so. This provides the perfect balance of abstraction for the team and minimizes the risk of having to file a ticket.
Drive standardization, slash maintainable files by 95%
The Platform Orchestrator generates app and infrastructure configs with every deployment. This means the platform is continuously standardizing your configs and minimizes tech debt. By reducing the maintainable surface area only to Score files and the default configs, the total number of maintainable files drops by up to 95%. This makes things less likely to fail or complicate testing, development, and deployment.
Compliance baked in
The Orchestrator comes with strong RBAC out of the box. This ensures only those allowed to change default configs have the relevant permissions. RBAC can also allow developers to move freely all the way up to pre-production environments but gate from there. The default configs and possible enforcement of secure abstractions allow security teams to test and confirm default resource configs once but allow reuse automatically.
"Using Humanitec’s approach helped us eliminate 6 out of 10 tickets. Operations can finally focus, developers can finally go fast."
Aaron Erickson - Director Platforms, Salesforce
Get your workflow under control in no time
After helping a large number of teams build their Internal Developer Platforms, we started to identify common patterns. We’ve summarized our learnings in a reference architecture tailored to your preferred cloud or on-prem environment. Check them out, we hope you’ll find them useful!
How to approach eliminating ticket ops with Humanitec’s products
- Describe your workload dependencies using the Score specification. Learn more here.
- Connect the Orchestrator to your CI pipeline. Learn more here.
- Set baseline configurations - and deploy!
