The challenge

If your toolchain or your Internal Developer Platform (IDP) isn’t set up for ease of use and with the right level of abstraction, developers will slow down instead of getting more productive. Overcomplicated or overly compliant 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 developers waiting for Ops, who are kept busy solving things for them.

High lead times and high rollout failure rates, ticket ops, and frustrated developers are 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 the Humanitec Platform Orchestrator helps you nail self-service

Enable developer self-service 

By introducing a workload specification like 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’ll then hit the Platform Orchestrator post-CI. Think of the Orchestrator like an operations colleague that never sleeps. 

Self-service requires context

Often the problem isn’t how to get something e.g. a piece of infrastructure, it’s how to get the right context to make 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 and slash error rates

The Platform Orchestrator generates app and infrastructure configs with every deployment. This means a platform built with Humanitec is continuously standardizing your configs, minimizing 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 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. 

Baked in compliance 

Going fast is awesome, as long as you don’t break things. The Orchestrator is equipped with a robust RBAC feature that restricts access to default configs, ensuring only authorized personnel can make changes. RBAC also enables developers to move seamlessly up to pre-production environments, but restricts access beyond that point. These secure abstractions and default configs make it possible for security teams to test and validate resource configs 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’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 enabling self-service 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!
• Git-push-deploy!