The problem
If your toolchain or your Internal Developer Platform isn’t setup for ease of use and with the right level of abstraction, developers slow down. Overcomplicated or overly compliance heavy structures mean they either have to debug and make sense of the mess themselves or default to other colleagues to do this for them. This often results in them waiting or others being kept busy solving things for them.
Low lead times and high rollout failure rates, ticket ops and frustrated developers is often the consequence.
“In a good setup developers and operations don’t have transactional conversations, they talk about improving the status quo”.
Jason Warner - CTO Github
How Humanitec products help you nail self-service
Streamline application development
By introducing a workload specification such as Score you 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 to send it with a git-push through the CI Pipelines. It will hit the Platform Orchestrator post-CI. The Orchestrator is like an operations colleague that never sleeps.
Self-service requires context
Often the problem isn’t how to get something, it’s how to get the right context to take a decision. Why did my deployment fail? What S3 buckets am I currently connecting to? Where can I see the logs? Is this resource in a healthy state? Using the Orchestrator UI, API or CLI you can retrieve this information easily and in a structure that displays everything workload by workload and environment by environment.
Drive standardization, slash the error rates
The Platform Orchestrator generates app- and infrastructure configurations with every deployment. This means the platform is continuously standardizing your configurations and minimizes error rates. Dependencies for instance are automatically injected with every single git-push dynamically. Making sure they are up to date and the right horse for the right course. By reducing the maintainable surface area to only Score files as well as well as the default configurations 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
It’s terrific to go fast, as long as you don’t break things. The Orchestrator is equipped with a robust RBAC feature that restricts access to default configurations, ensuring that only authorized personnel can make changes. RBAC also enables developers to move seamlessly up to pre-production environments but restricts access beyond that point. The secure abstractions and default configurations make it possible for security teams to test and validate resource configurations automatically while allowing for reuse.
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 have summarised our learnings in reference architecture tailored to your preferred cloud- or on-prem environment. Check them out, we hope they will do you good service!
