Cloud Management Platforms (CMPs) abstract the underlying complexity of provisioning, managing, and securing infrastructure across cloud providers. A CMP can expose a unified Terraform catalog that provisions infrastructure in any combination of public and private clouds, such as AWS, Azure and VMware. For DevOps and platform engineering teams juggling multiple accounts, tools, and policies, CMPs … Read more
“What is productivity in development? I mean, even with metrics like lead time, it might work against taking the time to do good things.” Julien ‘Seraf’ Syx, CTO & Product Lead, Cycloid Invisible processes sap energy and resources – not just from people, but also complex systems. Imagine the hidden waste that exists in cloud … Read more
Imagine you’re a DevOps engineer managing microservices on AWS. How would you configure auto-scaling to handle high traffic without wasting any resources?
If you’ve not been living under a rock for the last year and a half, chances are you’ve heard of Platform Engineering. The latest industry trend promises to do everything DevOps tried to do and failed, yet again: lighten your devs’ workload, improve DevX, skyrocket operational efficiency, and turn your projects into rivers of gold.
In truth, Platform Engineering continues the process DevOps started. With PE, leaders have an actionable plan to build toolchains and workflows that empower developers of any skill level with self-service capabilities. It’s an all-round solution that not only improves devs’ autonomy and collaboration, but also enhances resource management, and provides ecosystem and plug-in integration.
What makes a successful and sustainable platform engineering portal? Is it the level of observability it permits? Is it how many useful things it can do with your Terraform? Is it how customizable and user-friendly it is?
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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!)
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