Challenges in building and scaling internal platform teams

Say Hello to a New Developer Experience Layer. Our Tech Alliance With Aiven.

Humanitec has entered into a technical alliance with DBaaS provider Aiven. With this partnership, we can standardize 95% of all public cloud infrastructure into one unified developer experience layer. In other words, Humanitec, the application layer, and Aiven, the database layer, will be compatible on each public cloud infrastructure.

March 2, 2021

Michiel Mulders

The Fundamental Flaws of GitOps – A Statistical Analysis

Recently, everybody is talking about GitOps. The content you'll find is very optimistic about the GitOps paradigm. Yet, I've seen how Ops teams become increasingly frustrated when trying to scale alongside the GitOps approach. This article explains using statistical analysis how and why the satisfaction of choosing for GitOps decreases with a growing number of YAML files and microservices.

February 19, 2021

What Are the Core Components of an Internal Developer Platform?

An Internal Developer Platform consists of five core components. Application Configuration Management and Infrastructure Orchestration allow developers to independently spin up fully-provisioned environments. Moreover, developers can deploy workloads and connect the required dependencies automatically. Lastly, RBAC provides Ops teams with fine-grained access control over their organization.

February 10, 2021

Michiel Mulders

Developer Experience: How to Define Good Documentation?

When comparing products, you want to decide on their usefulness. Yet, we often forget to evaluate the project's documentation. A project might offer an excellent set of features but might lack easy-to-use documentation. This can have a detrimental effect on the developer experience and your team's efficiency. So, how do you evaluate the developer experience of documentation?

February 10, 2021

What Is an Internal Developer Platform?

The DevOps approach has become increasingly complex. This puts more pressure on your Ops teams. Elite teams at companies such as Github, Airbnb, and Spotify realized that this way of interpreting the paradigm increases developers' cognitive load and decreases team velocity. Therefore, these teams started building Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) to relieve pressure. But what is an IDP?

February 5, 2021

Deployment Frequency – A Key Metric in DevOps

Having the means to measure and assess the effectiveness of your DevOps strategy is critical to achieving and surpassing your goals. We take a look at the benefits of monitoring deployment frequency and why top-performing companies identify frequent deployment as a measure of success.

February 4, 2021

Scaling Your Team Alongside Kubernetes

Many of you have probably read countless technical articles about scaling application infrastructure and capacity with Kubernetes. This is not one of those posts. Rather, it looks at how and when to implement Kubernetes when your team or the demands on your team grow rapidly.

January 22, 2021

Don’t Call Us, We’ll Call You: Automate Delivery Workflows With Webhooks

Teams building their Internal Developer Platform with Humanitec can now use webhooks to notify other tools in their engineering workflow of a deployment to or the creation of an environment. This unleashes a bunch of interesting automations.

January 12, 2021

Oops, We’re Multicloud: A Hitchhiker's Guide To Surviving

We saw hundreds of platform setups of teams around the world last year. Surprisingly, often those teams operated multi-cloud setups. Multi-cloud is a horrible idea in 90% of cases but we found exceptions. This article covers the reasons and how winning teams prepare for the everyday hustle of multi-cloud setups.

January 8, 2021

DevOps – Standards vs. Freedom

In this article I will focus on a topic widely debated by people who design engineering workflows between Ops and developers: Is there a systematic approach that can balance the maintainability of the system, the velocity at which features get shipped and the freedom of the developers?

December 22, 2020

How To Decide on an API That Gives Your Team the Best Developer Experience

If you want to build your applications and business on existing APIs and not reinvent all functionality yourself, how do you decide between the plethora of options available? This article helps you make that decision based on the developer experience (DX) you should expect from an API.

December 15, 2020

The Impact of Internal Developer Platforms

An Internal Developer Platform (IDP) becomes more necessary as a team grows, and seeks to compartmentalize the complexity of DevOps and facilitate developer self-serving. We take a look at how an IDP like Humanitec can benefit your organization.

December 10, 2020

Build vs. Buy an Internal Developer Platform

We’ve long contended that building your own Internal Developer Platform (IDP) is the best way forward. But we want to back up our belief with fact. So, we’ve taken a look at the motivations behind building an IDP and more importantly, the real economics of build vs. buy.

December 9, 2020

Evaluating DevOps Maturity

Taking a brutally honest look under the hood of your company is critical if you want to succeed in DevOps. But how do you assess your DevOps setup and evaluate your DevOps maturity? Humanitec’s CEO, Kaspar von Grünberg, shares the 13 key attributes you need to evaluate your DevOps maturity.

December 3, 2020

The Rise of Internal Developer Platforms

Software engineering involves an understanding of architecture, abstractions and implementation details. Determining what knowledge is intrinsic to a team member’s role and what is outside of their scope is critical to reduce the strain on their cognitive load. Internal Developer Platforms provide a way to compartmentalize complexity, and enable people to focus on what’s critical to their role.

November 28, 2020

Why GitHub Built Their Own Internal Developer Platform

An Internal Developer Platform (IDP) is an essential step for rapidly scaling companies to keep their developers working productively and happily. In this roundtable discussion we speak with Jason Warner, the current CTO of GitHub and previous VP of Engineering for Heroku about how IDPs help teams of that scale build efficiently.

November 24, 2020

Why Sport1 Built Their Internal Developer Platform

German broadcaster Sport1 realized they were spending too much time grappling with an outdated deployment process, they decided it was time to build their own flexible Internal Developer Platform. Find out how it changed their development process in our roundtable with Paolo Garri, the director of technology.

November 23, 2020

Tame Your Zoo of Scripts

Maintaining scripts is like taming a zoo. We dive deep with developer teams into the common pain points of why scripts get out of hand. We provide actionable steps that you can undertake right now to create a path through the wilderness.

November 23, 2020

Organisational Benefits of Kubernetes [Webinar Recap]

In this article, we detail the key topics that featured in a recent roundtable discussion into the role of Kubernetes and DevOps in enterprise: understanding key principles, organisational buy-in, level of difficulty and where Kubernetes sits in terms of future innovation.

November 11, 2020

Your Helm Zoo Will Kill You

There is a fundamental design flaw with Helm, leading to dramatic long-term consequences and you have to solve this now.

November 11, 2020

Testing Hotfixes To Production Without Rolling Back Staging

A major bug urgently needs fixing in Production, but QA is impossible because Staging is ahead of Prod. This blog post will detail how to clone your Production environment to allow immediate testing before hot-fixing Production.

November 4, 2020

How We Created a Humanitec Driver for Amazon ElastiCache for Redis - a Hackathon With Polar Squad

At the end of September 2020, participants from Humanitec and Polar Squad met for a small hackathon to see how straightforward it was to create a resource driver for the Humanitec platform so that others can connect their custom infrastructure.

October 23, 2020

DevOps Enterprise Summit Shows the Reality of DevOps Across Industries

We attended the recent Devops Enterprise (virtual) summit. Here we detail some of the key presentations covered: a look back at Team Topologies by its authors, the importance of psychological safety, and the challenges of operations teams in DevOps.

October 23, 2020

We Just Built the Perfect Feature for Customers To Leave Us: Export Kubernetes Manifests

Recently we have released a feature that allows users to Export Manifests for any deployment recorded on our platform. This way you keep full ownership of your configmap, deployment, ingress, secrets and service .yaml files as well as any other external dependencies you may have.

October 15, 2020

Why Zalando Built Their Internal Developer Platform‍

An Internal Developer Platform (IDP) is an essential step for rapidly scaling companies to keep their developers working productively and happily. In this roundtable discussion we speak with Jan Löffler who helped build Zalando’s IDP about the problems they were trying to solve and the steps they took.

October 12, 2020

An Introduction To Developer Experience (DevEx, DX)

In this article I look mostly at improving the developer experience within a company, and touch upon other aspects where relevant, we have future articles planned to help you improve the DX of the projects you maintain. The goal of this article is to help those in charge of development teams understand what their developers struggle with and complain about and help them do something about it.

October 6, 2020

Version Changes To Configurations for Kubernetes-Ready Applications

Your Kubernetes configuration represents environments that are a fundamental part of your application, unyet we generally treat them as less important from our application code. In this post we look at best practices for managing changes to configuration, and how to treat it the way it deserves.

September 21, 2020

KubeLibrary: Testing Kubernetes With RobotFramework

This article explores the RobotFramework library KubeLibrary. KubeLibrary is a wrapper for the Python Kubernetes Client. It enables you to assert the status of various objects in your Kubernetes Clusters. As the library can be integrated with any RobotFramework test suite, it is ideal to verify the testability of your System-under-Test by asserting the status of your nodes, deployments, pods, configmaps, and others Kubernetes objects before running any end to end tests.

September 16, 2020

Humanitec Partners With CircleCI

We are proud to announce that Humanitec has become an official technology partner of CircleCI and their Orb program. CircleCI users can now seamlessly integrate their CircleCI build pipeline with Humanitec’s workflows. Using Humanitec’s Orb, they can build and push new images to Humanitec and improve the maintenance of their Kubernetes-ready applications after every CircleCI build.

August 24, 2020

Christoph Richter

Feature Announcement: Automated Deployments

Interest in DevOps adoption has increased. Most teams are either running automated deployments or are hoping to run them in the future as they look to improve their workflow and workplace practices. Being able to deploy your environments automatically is an excellent opportunity to optimize developer productivity.

August 13, 2020

Test Automation in Kubernetes - Robokon 2020

Test automation in Kubernetes at RoboKon 2020 (German Robotframework Online Konferenz 30.07.2020).

August 11, 2020

Sandbox Environments for Testing

In this article by Nils Balkow Tychsen, Lead Q&A Engineer at Humanitec, you will learn some use cases for sandboxed environments such as parallel feature development, parallel testing of feature flags, and parallel testing of microservice versions in different combinations.

August 6, 2020

Developer Experience Roundtable - Continuous Improvement

A good developer experience is crucial to keep developer teams productive, happy, and focussed on work important to your business aims. In this first roundtable, we get the opinions and experiences from two experts in the field: Nigel Simpson, Director, Enterprise Tech Strategy at a Fortune 100 company, and Erik Muttersbach, CTO at forto (formerly FreightHub), a Berlin logistics startup.

July 14, 2020

Feature Announcement: The Continuous Delivery API (Beta)

We are very excited to make the Humanitec API available as a public Beta today! Our API provides the same functionality teams have enjoyed through our UI - but now allows for more opportunities for automation and integration.

July 8, 2020

Every Second Matters - the Hidden Costs of Unoptimized Developer Workflows

We tend to underestimate how inefficient workflows impact developer productivity and distract from the task at hand. In this article we explain the first- and second-order effects of inefficient developer workflows. We share real-life examples and analyse at what point you should invest in automation vs. doing things manually.

July 7, 2020

DevOps Enterprise Summit 2020 Showcases a Work in Progress With Significant Business Outcomes

We take a look at some of the presentations from the recent DevOps Enterprise Summit London: Thomas Limoncelli explores the importance of a low context culture and documentation; Daniel Maher shares his experience of how the SRE role relates to DevOps, and Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais walk through some of the fundamentals of Team Topologies in practice with a range of business case studies.

July 3, 2020

Humanitec

Ephemeral Environments for Testing

In this article, we look at ephemeral testing environments, small, discrete, and short-lived testing environments that reflect only the changes you are interested in testing.

June 30, 2020

Getting To Know Humanitec | Lab #1: Deploy Static Site Using Hugo

In this article you will learn some basic concepts about the deployment process with Humanitec. As a simple example, we will deploy a Hugo static site.

June 25, 2020

Christoph Richter

7 Things in Your DevOps Workflow That Kill Your Developer Productivity

Why does everything always take so long? Most of us ask ourselves this question every day. In this article Humanitec’s CEO Kaspar von Grünberg shares some thoughts about developer productivity and how to improve it. 7 points about your DevOps workflow you should definitely keep in mind!

June 24, 2020

Continuous Integration (CI) vs. Continuous Delivery (CD) vs. Continuous Deployment (CD)

Despite sounding similar, continuous integration, delivery, and deployment are subtly different from each other. While they have overlap, they are applicable and useful at different stages of the development process. In this post, we look at what the different terms mean, what benefits they bring to you and your team, and what you need to get started implementing the practice.

June 19, 2020

The Benefits and Best Practices of Continuous Delivery

Continuous delivery helps software development teams get their code changes from development to testing, and into the hands of users more quickly. In this post, Chris Ward looks at the benefits and best practices for implementing this practice into your teams.

June 16, 2020

How To Manage Environment Variables?

How to manage environment variables? Read the full interview with DevOps Engineer Antoine Rougeot about the fear to break things, teams struggling with Microservice setups, and some hot tips.

June 15, 2020

Antoine Rougeot

Lead Time – a Key Metric in DevOps

Lead time is a critical metric to enable a company to improve its speed of deployment. We take a deep dive into how lead time differs across organizations, how it can be improved and where it fits into the greater context of improving business outcomes.

June 10, 2020

Handling Environment Variables With Kubernetes

Environment variables are a common way for developers to move application and infrastructure configuration into an external source outside of application code. This post shows you the variety of ways Kuberentes helps you create and manage environment variables within kubernetes.

June 5, 2020

Environment Variables: Unlock the Full Potential of Kubernetes by Storing Configuration in the Environment

In this article Christoph Richter, COO at Humanitec, shares insights about the potential of environment variables. Storing configurations in the environment is important if your team wants to use container-based applications, or continuous delivery as effectively as possible.

June 4, 2020

Christoph Richter

The Four Key Metrics of DevOps

Having a means to measure and assess the effectiveness of your DevOps strategy is a critical key to achieving and surpassing your goals. We take a look at four key metrics that can enable you to measure the effectiveness of your strategies and the progress of your team.

May 5, 2020

Deploy With Kubectl - Hands-on With Kubernetes

Orchestrating an application in Kubernetes can be even in a simple setup pretty complex. In this post, you learn how to architect a Kubernetes-native application and create a first deployment using kubectl.

April 30, 2020

The Benefits of Containerization

Breaking applications into smaller coupled components like microservices, and running each of those components in containers often go hand in hand. These modern application architecture principles have allowed many businesses and software projects to make regular and rapid changes to running software and scale them to suit changes in demand and approach. In this article, we breakdown what a container is, and the direct benefits they bring to your developer teams and business.

April 22, 2020

Release Announcement: Continuous Delivery on Kubernetes From Any CI Pipeline To Your Infrastructure

Since our latest release, it is possible to connect Humanitec to any existing CI pipeline to deploy container images to different environments. Read more how we help development teams to adopt DevOps best practices by allowing everyone to manage day-to-day tasks without getting lost in the complexity of Kubernetes.

April 20, 2020

Robot Framework: The Key To Improve Testing

The Robot Framework is a generic open source automation framework for acceptance testing, acceptance test driven development (ATDD), and robotic process automation (RPA). In the article, we describe the key benefits to using this framework for test automation.

February 27, 2020

How To Set up a Simple Kubernetes Cluster on Google Cloud Platform

Learn how to set up a simple Kubernetes cluster on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and deploy your first containerized web application.

February 6, 2020

Florian Lipp

Learnings From Implementing Github Social Authentication

Learn the benefits of social authentication, how it works, and challenges Humanitec faced when implementing it with GitHub. In addition, find out why automation is a critical part of testing social authentication.

January 23, 2020

Managing Environments for More Than One Service or App in a Kubernetes Cluster

Increasing numbers of services in a cluster can quickly lead to versioning dependency hell. Learning how to manage those environments properly will save users from problems when testing.

January 21, 2020

Kubernetes Environments Management Basics

Before you can make the most of your Kubernetes environment, you need to understand some basics. This includes understanding what an environment is, why you need more than one, the common cluster challenges that many developers face, and the basics of managing a Kubernetes environment.

December 20, 2019

Velocity Conference Berlin 2019 - a Brief Recap

The Velocity Conference took place in Berlin from 4 to 7 November 2019. We at Humanitec are very proud to have exhibited with a booth on the main floor. Here are our highlights of the conference.

November 18, 2019

Florian Lipp

Speed up DevOps With the Humanitec Internal Developer Platform (Idp)

Working with microservices architecture across multiple stakeholders and with no DevOps can be challenging. One of the first users of the Humanitec Internal Developer Platform (IDP) - Backend Developer Ralf and Product Manager Domile - share their experience managing a Field Force Management application through the Humanitec IDP.

November 13, 2019

Ralf Kostulski

Testing in Microservice Architectures

Software built in microservice architectures provides great opportunities for testers but also come with some challenges. This article describes 8 main parameters to successful testing of microservices.

February 19, 2019