Build it and they will come. That’s the idea, right? But you may have realised, perhaps through a process of failure (we hope not), that that’s not a reliable way to guarantee an audience.
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Modern Infra as Foundation to Platform Engineering
Modernizing your infrastructure could take many forms. Artificial intelligence, GreenOps, FinOps, and sustainability are all aspects that are just on the cusp of changing tech forever (for the better? It’s still hard to tell – we’re looking at you, ChatGPT!). The possibilities are endless and exciting.
What is sustainable platform engineering?
If you’re hanging around the Cycloid website, chances are you’re familiar with platform engineering and may well have already received the slightly worrying verdict on the topic delivered by the State of DevOps Report 2023 – Platform Engineering: on average, platform engineering takes 3 years to start showing its benefits to the wider organization!
Migrating Infra to IaC: An Infra Import Use Case
Imagine this: you’re looking to scale your infrastructure to match your rapid business growth. Infrastructure-as-code is an excellent way of modernizing infrastructure. You know that the longer you wait to make the move to IaC, the deeper your business will sink into the quicksand of human error and, eventually, slower deployment. However, industrializing your manually-deployed infra is a daunting and resource-extensive task.
Developer Self-Service: Key to Platform Engineering
Wider teams are resisting adopting an internal developer platform, and platform engineers are pulling their hair trying to understand why, according to the State of DevOps 2023 Report. Is it too complex? Does it not do the job? Is the UI not sleek enough? Possibly all of the above, but the real culprit is under-education and under-communication about the possibilities of an internal developer platform to your wider team.
Developer self-service is an integral part of platform engineering, and one that has the most number of users across an organization. If you can get your team to adopt developer self-service, your platform engineering strategy is in the bag. But for this to happen, it should satisfy the needs of all – both end-users (devs, solution architects, IT teams) and Ops.
So, building developer self-service, which is more than simply designing a fancy UI (though it is very important and overlooked by many!) – it’s about building a functional tool with a user in mind. It’s not just making it user-friendly – make it user-oriented!
Treating the platform as a product that answers your customers’ (wider teams’) needs is what will help you build a platform that’s going to be easy to adopt.
How can you make developer self-service more user-friendly?
Address the user’s needs
Just like any relationship, it’s all about communication. In an ideal world, end-users communicate their needs, and the platform team responds to them as best they can. The platform team’s role is to put their end-users in the best position to handle tools, processes, and infrastructure, but how exactly that’s done depends on individual members.
Treat your colleagues as if they were your customers, and the platform as a product, then the roadmap becomes so much simpler and clearer.
If your team can’t articulate their wants and needs clearly, take the next best thing – an out-of-the-box industry standard solution. We’ve written loads on the benefits of buying vs building, but the gist is this – why spend hours of your precious time perfecting what’s already been perfected by experts? There’s nothing your team is going to gain from reinventing the wheel, so you’ll be safer with market-tested solutions.
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Cycloid’s own self-service portal StackForms prioritizes end-user experience to make configuring new environments as seamless and autonomous as possible. We aim for flexibility, simplicity, and control when it comes to self-service, concealing complex tech behind a user-friendly interface (so hopefully we know what we’re talking about!)
Autonomy and security
Cloud Cost Optimization: Best Practices to Save
The tech industry is not having a great time at the moment. The 5 US tech giants – Microsoft, Google, Apple, Meta, and Amazon – have reported losses in 2022 for the first time in years, and announced massive job layoffs. Of course, they’re by no means going bankrupt, still having earned a combined $243 billion, but seeing as this figure is slightly lower than in 2021, this is sending executives (and the tech industry as a whole) into panic mode (as if it’s not at all a sign of people getting fed up with living in late-stage capitalism).
With major companies bringing back efficiency and profitability, more and more businesses are talking about squeezing budgets in light of the cost of living crisis and the slowing global economy. If you’re considering cutting excess weight in your spreadsheets, here’s a suggestion – why not take a look at your cloud spending?
If 2023 is supposed to be “the year of efficiency”, optimizing your cloud usage is one to start. Not only do cloud costs make up almost 41% of the IT budget according to Gartner – meaning cutting it would make a real difference to your overall finances – in most cases, a lot of the cloud ends up being wasted. Our founder Benjamin Brial has written on the subject of cloud waste before, but the TL:DR is this: despite the cost of the cloud going down, companies’ spending on it has doubled in the last few years, with over $26 billion wasted on inefficient cloud usage. For a hyper-efficient IT world, it’s terribly below the mark.
If any of this rings true, don’t despair – there are ways to cut your spending and optimize cloud usage.
Get good FinOps software to track your costs
One of the reasons cloud spending keeps rising is the fact that cloud costs are shrouded in complexity and mystery, and traditional ways of monitoring them just don’t cut it anymore. Tracking with spreadsheets can get really complicated really fast while chasing data around multiple cloud cost management solutions across your cloud providers is already unnecessarily complex and can mask the real culprits.
What you must be looking for in a FinOps tool is the level of data granularity. You must be able to see the cost breakdown by project, region, provider, date range, or even team, to identify blindspots and money suckers, which would normally be overlooked.
Centralization and ease of access also play a part: the faster you can get a bird’s eye view of your cloud usage, the easier it is to correct course in case of errors. Marketing departments have ruined the word “holistic” for the world, but it’s exactly what you should be aiming for because getting the big picture, trends, and predictions for cloud resources can be the real missing piece to your financial strategy.
This is perhaps where we could plug our own FinOps module Cloud Cost Management, which does all of the above, but the consumer choice is really up to you – we can only advise on what to look out for.
Resource management
7 Platform Engineering KPIs you should be tracking
Platform engineering is becoming an increasingly popular approach to software delivery because it offers benefits such as improved time-to-market speed, increased developer happiness, and breaking down of team silos. We wrote extensively about platform engineering, specifically that it’s not, in fact, new and DevOps is not dead. However, given how many enterprises have struggled with delivering DevOps business value, they might view building internal digital platforms to aid software delivery as an actionable plan to achieve everything DevOps ever promised.
But how do you avoid falling into the same trap that held 80% of companies back from adopting DevOps?
Our advice: treat your internal developer platform like an internal product, and your wider teams as your customers. This means that your success metrics should be the same as you would use for your customers – with a platform engineering twist.
Key goals of Platform Engineering
When setting up your success metrics, it’s important to not lose sight of what your Platform Engineering strategy should aim for. According to the 2023 State of DevOps report, these were the top goals companies set for their platform teams.
Educating and empowering developer and product teams is a major priority for platform teams, followed by iteration speed and security processes. This people-centric approach is the same one you should adopt in your metrics. Reinventing tools is only half the job – you need to make sure your people are comfortable using the new frameworks. Streamlining and automating processes according to DevX best practices helps the entire organization move more quickly and drive a competitive edge.
Platform Engineering KPIs
According to the 2023 State of DevOps report, after adopting Platform Engineering, the majority of enterprises saw improvements in system reliability (60%), productivity and efficiency (59%), and workflow standards (57%), while 42% reported improved development time.
Productivity
Measuring lines of code produced by developers in X amount of time is an outdated metric used these days perhaps only by the likes of Elon Musk. Developer productivity is a sensitive subject, and while platform engineering promises to speed up software development, it doesn’t happen by making developers deliver more.
Instead, it’s about creating the best conditions for your devs to thrive in. Think about the bottlenecks and obstacles that your teams have to deal with daily and how much they have to rely on experts to get their work done. Complex infrastructure deployments, creating new environments, shipping features – all these require DevOps help, which inevitably clogs up processes. KPIs centered around streamlining and simplifying the software delivery process should be your focus.
- Lead Time
This is a measurement that tracks the time from when a user story is initiated to when it’s ready for delivery. This time can also include discussions about the user story, how long it was waiting in the backlog, and how much time it took the story to move from pickup to release.
If your lead time for changes is too high, it’s a clear sign of a roadblock somewhere in your processes, causing items in the backlog not to move along. Automating whatever could be automated will help keep your lead time low, as it shows your teams are quick to adapt to feedback and deliver on their goals.
Cloud Carbon Footprint: GreenOps + FinOps Approach
Cycloid is proud to present Cloud Carbon Footprint, our own cloud carbon emissions module integrated with our established FinOps solution. We’re taking a unique GreenOps + FinOps approach to monitoring cloud computing emissions by connecting your emissions data to your cloud expenses so you see both costs to your budget and the cost to the environment in the same place. We’re hoping this approach will promote a culture of sobriety, where companies will start making more environmentally conscious decisions by reducing the amount of cloud waste.
Self-Service Kubernetes: Enable K8s Self-Service | Cycloid
Platform engineering is taking the IT world by storm. We’re seeing articles claiming that platform engineering is finally going to end the DevOps reign and achieve everything DevOps never could – agility, automation, developer experience, efficiency and governance. The path to IT transformation and business growth that the new trend paints through self-service seems so painfully obvious, but let us tell you a little secret – it is not new. The trend might be a fresh marketing buzzword, but forward-thinking companies have already been utilizing the benefits of a platform engineering approach. Today’s platform teams are tasked with exactly this: building and maintaining an internal developer platform that connects the end-user to infrastructure management through simple developer self-service and improves efficiency and developer experience.
This idea has been working in practice for a while — and we should know, since improving operational efficiency through a developer platform with self-service is Cycloid’s core offer. We’ve recently used platform engineering to help our client Alchemy scale their automation and move infrastructure to Kubernetes on AWS.
Here’s what we did step by step:
Step 1: Take an Opinionated Approach to the Development Environment
Alchemy is a digital asset management company that helps organizations to implement the open solution for managing digital content using Phraseanet, and starting now with the brand new Phrasea, a promising DAM/MAM on AWS. They have a small team of developers that were able to service their clients needs – but as the company grew, they needed a way to scale up effortlessly.
Kubernetes clusters are a great option for enterprise applications and scaling on the fly, however they require vast specialist knowledge to set up. The team expressed a need for a self-service environment that would abstract away the Kubernetes complexity. Here’s what they were looking for in the platform:
- Everyone can deploy Kubernetes automation regardless of skill level
- Easy switching between organizations for different clients
- See and control how much they’re spending on the cloud
- Control deployment progress in CI/CD pipelines
Step 2. Adopt an engineering platform
The beauty of an engineering platform is that it gels together and centralizes all of the features and services you need — like governance, deployment and operations. An engineering platform strives to achieve three things:
- enable developer self-service
- boost effectiveness and productivity by automating repetitive tasks
- enhance developers’ and end-users’ experience of working with the infrastructure.
Not only does the Cycloid Engineering Platform provide a self-service portal that allows to automate and use Kubernetes clusters with ease, but it also completes the solution with modules around governance and FinOps in a full GitOps approach.
“As developers, we loved being able to operate the application in a simple way. It’s based on GitOps so we aren’t locked to any one service and embeds open-source solutions natively – which, being based on open-source Phraseanet, we really appreciated”, says Alchemy CEO Guillaume Maubert.
The diagram below describes the benefits of a platform engineering approach:
Scale Kubernetes automation through an engineering platform:
Step 3. Build the Stack
First order of action is to build a reproducible service catalog that would hide the Kubernetes complexity.
Building a service catalog means being able to reproduce environment parameters for each new deployment without having to build it from scratch. This allows devs without specialized experience to simply choose approved and suitable infra configurations and save loads of time on deployments. It encourages the use of best practice in a full GitOps approach – without the need for time-consuming tech supervision. You only need to set it up once, and Kubernetes complexity just isn’t a problem anymore.
Cycloid’s service catalog is called Stacks and our DevOps team helped them build the first two.
First one would allow Alchemy to create AWS EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) cluster and external services.
The second application Stack was created to make it possible to deploy all their applications inside an AWS EKS cluster and configure them to use AWS services.
Alchemy is using the following AWS services after migration:
- Elastic Compute Cloud
- Simple Storage Service
- Elastic File System
- Backup
- Relational Database Service
- OpenSearch Service
- CloudWatch
- ElastiCache (redis)
- Elastic Load Balancing
- Data Transfer
- Route 53
- Virtual Private Cloud
- Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes
- EC2 Container Registry (ECR)
Step 4. Get the best developer experience with self-service
Once the Stacks are set up and automation configs are ready, Alchemy developers are free to configure new environments in a self-service portal called StackForms. Cycloid’s self-service looks simple: it’s a regular webform with dropdown menus and toggles for ease-of-use. Developers can now simply select the relevant Stack, choose variables and hit run – it’s that easy.
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How self-service improves DevX:
- Fast and efficient deployment
- User-friendly UX
- Built-in governance
Cost Estimation on the side lets the developer know how much each new environment is going to cost before it’s deployed. It fosters autonomy, independence and business responsibility, while also improving developer experience.
Step 5. Enjoy business acceleration
Where previously setting up a new Kubernetes cluster on AWS could easily take more than a day, with Cycloid’s self-service, it only takes 5 minutes! Taking into consideration the 30 minutes AWS needs to provision the new infra, and you’ve got a new environment in less than an hour!
But the beauty of platform engineering with a self-service core doesn’t stop there. Since Alchemy works with multiple customers, the Cycloid platforms allows them to switch between them easily while still being able to apply the same service catalogue to their projects. The platform’s built-in governance features pre-define minimal user privilege, ensuring compliance but allowing exactly the right amount of flexibility individuals need to do their job.
In the near future Alchemy is looking at utilising the capabilities of Cycloid’s built-in FinOps module that centralizes cloud costs in a single panel which you can view by provider, project, region, client etc. This would allow them to take better control of their Kubernetes deployments on AWS and possibly expand to other cloud providers – we’ve written about the benefits of hybrid cloud extensively.
Platform Engineering for the win
With a self-service portal and controlled flexibility, we were able to find the right balance. On one hand, developers get a simple interface that abstracts away the unnecessary details of the underlying infrastructure. At the same time, the platform team has a full degree of flexibility to deploy any automation in a matter of minutes and in the process simplify one of the most complex and tedious DevOps tasks.
If you’re now establishing a platform engineering strategy, starting with a tried and tested platform would help you avoid reinventing the wheel and get started on your IT transformation journey quickly and painlessly.
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Cloud carbon footprint: measures to take
COP27 took place in Egypt last month, the latest in the series of conferences that bring the global community together in the hope of agreeing on action to mitigate the climate emergency. Many ecologists have questioned how helpful these endless meetings have actually been. Although getting everyone around the table is an important first step, the gathering has received criticism for promoting an all-talk, no-action approach to climate change.
We all have a duty to tackle climate change, and in order to achieve the ambitions set out by successive COP meetings, businesses now need to begin laying the foundation for reducing their cloud computing emissions across every organization. Whilst improving efficiency and digitalizing operations bring with them environmental benefits, IT departments themselves don’t always have visibility over their own carbon footprint. If we are to build a foundation upon which to meet green objectives, this needs to change.
With GreenOps, organizations can massively improve their visibility into the environmental impact of IT operations, putting decarbonization at the heart of decision-making.
At its most basic, GreenOps is a framework for organizations to start understanding the environmental impacts of their IT strategies. Think of it as FinOps, a framework for managing operational expenditure, but for the planet. At the same time, it empowers organizations to promote environmental responsibility at every level through data-driven decision-making and insights.
You can read more about GreenOps here, but the bottom line is that it gives organizations of any size the ability to start taking data-driven decisions to decrease their carbon footprint.
A fair question often asked of proponents of GreenOps is: can we really expect businesses to make more expensive decisions for the sake of the environment? Certainly, in our current economic climate, there is a need for much more sobriety in spending across all industries, so it is a challenge to pick green options over cheaper alternatives. However, if COP27 has shown us one thing, it is that the time to act is now.
Like the decisions at COP27, nobody can guarantee that greener choices will be the easier choices. In fact, many environmentally friendly options are often more expensive and time-consuming than those which cause larger emissions. However, businesses must avoid just “talking the talk” about tackling the climate emergency if they have no intention of putting it into action. GreenOps acts as a fantastic foundation for greener business practices; businesses that are serious about acting more than talking when it comes to environmentalism should look to implement it as a priority.