November 2023 Summaries

Gartner has placed platform engineering at the top of its trends to watch, and it's a big deal for organizations that want to improve their performance through internal developer platforms. Many teams are struggling to get started because they don't know how to design and implement these solutions, fearing that if they start small, they'll lose momentum before achieving success. Successful platform engineering initiatives start by working with a pioneering group of stakeholders who adopt new technologies first, and then scale up from there. They achieve this by starting small, deploying applications quickly, and providing value to all relevant stakeholders in a short amount of time. The platform team works closely with the developers and security teams to enforce governance policies and deploy resources efficiently. With Humanitec's products, organizations can get started quickly and prove the value of their platform engineering initiative within two weeks, making it an attractive option for companies looking to improve their performance.

An Internal Developer Platform (IDP) is a platform layer that is built and shipped as a product by a dedicated platform engineering team to remove complexity without removing context, enabling developer self-service and true DevOps at an enterprise scale. It consists of five planes: Developer Control Plane, Integration and Delivery Plane, Monitoring and Logging Plane, Security Plane, and Resource Plane, with a Platform Orchestrator acting as the glue that makes them work together. Key design principles include giving developers their choice of interface, not breaking their workflows, and shipping the platform as a product. An IDP is distinct from an internal developer portal, which is just one part of the overall platform engineering space. A PaaS (Platform as a Service) can be a solution for small teams or greenfield scenarios but doesn't scale to complex enterprise setups and often lacks key features like code being the single source of truth and developers picking their interface of choice.

The Humanitec Platform Orchestrator now offers a secure and transparent way to manage API tokens with its new Service User page, replacing the old API tokens settings. This change aims to simplify token management by providing a more controlled and scalable approach to managing access permissions, token expiration dates, and storage. The new feature allows users to create non-human users called Service Users, which can generate API tokens to interact with Humanitec's API on their behalf, offering more flexibility and security in token management. The introduction of the Artefact Contributor role provides additional control over access to certain features within the platform. By leveraging this new functionality, users can better manage their tech stack and minimize potential security vulnerabilities associated with ineffective token management.