January 2022 Summaries

The traditional engineering approach with developers, operations, and SRE teams acting independently can be a significant blocker for development teams. However, by adopting an internal GitOps platform, companies like Achievers were able to remove these blockers and improve the Developer Experience (DexEx). The key philosophy of this project was that no SRE should block an engineer from managing the lifecycle of their microservice, driving the team towards making their internal platforms as easy to navigate as possible. This involved using common elements and templates, feature flags, and tools like Tilt to handle different parts of the development pipeline. By empowering engineers with more control, building systems that use familiar languages and structures, and tracking key metrics such as adoption rates and time to production, companies can create a positive developer experience that directly impacts their internal platform development and GitOps workflows.

Galo Navarro, a lead software engineer at New Relic, built an internal Platform as a Service (PaaS) for 1500 engineers at Adevinta, where he faced numerous challenges in managing infrastructure and supporting twenty sub-companies with their own ecosystems. To build value, Galo's team focused on creating a fully realized product that could help engineers across the development cycle, emphasizing "building a golden path" without restricting engineers from using alternative tools. The goal was to demonstrate impact through small, measurable changes, such as automating low-value activities, and to provide zero-friction onboarding with user-friendly interfaces and support. By adopting this approach, Galo's team successfully built an internal PaaS that provided proven value and influenced behavior among teams, ultimately showcasing the benefits of an IDP in the DevOps environment.

Platform teams are taking hold in organizations as a solution to handle internal products and services in a controlled and efficient manner. They create and maintain an organization's Internal Developer Platform (IDP) while developing and improving the business's tools. Platform teams provide infrastructure, environments, deployment pipelines, and other internal services that enable internal customers to build, deploy, and run their teams. This approach shifts the business method away from siloed teams with unclear roles within the organization, instead focusing on outcomes and providing solutions to internal teams through communication. The role of platform teams is crucial in achieving lower friction, faster software delivery, and higher quality outcomes. They engage both automation and the communication process, ensuring employees can focus on their job and work efficiently. Platform teams approach has a single place where all concerns regarding infrastructure are solved for developers, creating a unified corporate model for development.

Product managers interact with Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) like Humanitec primarily through a single source of truth and visibility into the state of infrastructure and configurations, which enables them to have consistent conversations with their teams. Traditional CI/CD setups are often complex and make it hard for product managers to understand what has happened, what needs to be done, and what has gone wrong, particularly in microservice architectures with many services and dependencies. An IDP like Humanitec simplifies this process by providing a declarative way of describing applications in an infrastructure-agnostic manner, creating a log of all changes made to any part of the application at deployment time, and allowing product managers to focus on what's important to the business rather than waiting for infrastructure provisioned by others.

Frontend developers can benefit from using an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) by gaining self-service capabilities that enable them to operate apps on their own without relying on others, thereby increasing productivity and reducing manual work. IDPs provide full visibility into how applications run, allowing developers to understand the interplay between application layer and infrastructure, leading to better code quality and reduced complexity in setup. With an IDP, frontend developers can perform tasks such as adding environment variables, spinning up new environments, and rolling back changes with ease, streamlining their workflows and improving overall developer experience.

Internal Developer Platforms like Humanitec enable self-service for developers, allowing them to manage internal applications, pipelines, and deployment infrastructure. QA engineers benefit from working with IDPs by having a unified platform API that provides insights into the state of deployed applications, making it easier to identify issues and optimize testing. QAs can develop custom views and applications on top of the Platform API, reducing context switching and cognitive load, and enabling them to focus on what they need to observe. An IDP does not restrict QA engineers but rather provides an additional layer that enables them to have a more focused view and easier access to information, ultimately improving their efficiency and productivity.

Platform engineering is essential in building internal developer platforms at the enterprise level, as it allows companies to treat their platforms as products and focus on delivering value, high-quality, speed, and optimizing for the developer experience. A generative culture is crucial for platform success, and companies should prioritize speed over cost. Platforms need to be designed with the customer in mind, including minimizing burden and making it easy for consumers to access and use them. Team leaders must set clear outcomes and create an environment where teams can work together to make something happen. The key to successful platforms is to start small, learn before scaling, and design for joy, which includes making problems visible and setting up a system of accountability.