January 2024 Summaries

At Humanitec, we're committed to enhancing the productivity of development teams by continuously evolving our Platform Orchestrator to meet their complex and unique needs. With this goal in mind, we've added a new feature: Custom Workload Profiles. A Workload is a representation of code running in a Kubernetes cluster, typically as a pod, while a Profile defines infrastructure and runtime requirements for applications and services. The three default Profiles provided by Humanitec previously contained generic features useful for most standard Workloads. With Customizable Workload Profiles, developers can now precisely control the inputs required by their Workloads and how they should be rendered in the Humanitec Portal. This allows for tailored abstraction, empowering platform teams to curate the right level of abstraction for their developers. By fine-tuning Workload Profiles, teams can simplify the UX for developers, reduce cognitive load, and improve productivity when deploying new workloads or making changes to existing ones.

The situation with Broadcom's acquisition of VMware is causing concern among customers, who are facing potential price increases, reduced product development and support, as well as a lack of clear migration strategies for their Tanzu Application Platform (TAP) and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG). Humanitec, in partnership with Thoughtworks and Bechtle, is offering a solution to help customers break free from the lock-in effect and transition to a modular Internal Developer Platform that combines superior user experience, high productivity, and low lock-in. The company's technical approach involves introducing an abstraction layer, isolating the virtualization layer, and using a Platform Orchestrator to generate dynamic configurations per deployment, allowing customers to swap underlying virtualization layers easily and run on different cloud providers for development and staging environments. Humanitec is collaborating with Thoughtworks and Bechtle to provide a scalable and cost-effective response to this dilemma, offering free 60-minute exploratory sessions with platform architects to discuss customer's situation and explore the rescue mission options.

The text discusses the importance of building a Minimum Viable Platform (MVP) as a starting point for platform engineering initiatives. The main reason to build an MVP is to avoid complexity and scope creep, allowing businesses to start small, nimble, and cheaply. The MVP concept is rooted in lean methodology, focusing on starting small and simple to prove value and then expanding over time. A pioneer team leads the way in driving innovation, and a representative use case is used to demonstrate value to key stakeholders. The framework involves building a highly simplified platform, developing a product-like roadmap based on user feedback for iteration and growth, seeking out influential stakeholders, and getting them onboard quickly. The MVP should be representative, repeatable, iterative, and innovative, with a focus on growth and iteration in mind. By following this process, businesses can build a platform in just four weeks rather than months or years.

The Humanitec Operator is a powerful Kubernetes operator that controls deployments made with Humanitec, offering enhanced security scenarios by providing full flexibility in managing secrets and controlling cluster access. It introduces a new deployment model that enables users to manage secrets within their infrastructure, granting them control over storage location and access rights. The operator operates in different modes, including Secrets stored by the customer but can be used outside the customer's network, Secrets stored by the customer that do not leave the customer's network, Self-hosted, and Full SaaS (default). These modes offer increasing levels of control and security, allowing users to select the mode that best aligns with their organization's preferences and security requirements. The operator can be used in conjunction with GitOps deployment approaches, such as ArgoCD or Flux, to execute instructions represented by custom Resources.

PlatformCon 2024 is a prominent event in the platform engineering space, set to take place from June 10th to June 14th, featuring a week-long schedule of talks and sessions on various aspects of platform engineering. The conference will bring together seasoned experts and thought leaders who will share valuable insights and stories about their platform journey. With nearly 35,000 expected signups, PlatformCon is the largest event in this field, offering attendees opportunities to deepen their knowledge, network, and explore different dimensions of platform engineering. A new highlight is the Open Source Software Day, where attendees can learn about the latest developments and trends. The community invites practitioners with a platform journey to share their experiences by submitting talk proposals until February 25th, ensuring that this year's event is even bigger and better than before.

We’re thrilled to announce the much-anticipated public beta release of humctl, Humanitec’s very own CLI. After much hard work and valuable feedback from our dedicated early adopters, we're excited to open the doors to a wider audience. We invite you to experience the efficiency of humctl in allowing you to easily run your deployments via command line. This release introduces a range of features designed to make your CLI experience more versatile, user-friendly, and powerful than ever before. humctl is now available for everyone, whether you're an experienced developer or just getting started with command-line interfaces. The new version includes improved usability, robust Help Functionality, diverse output formats, and streamlined commands. With humctl, users can enjoy a smooth and efficient experience when interacting with the Humanitec Platform Orchestrator. To get started, download or update humctl, explore different output formats, discover help functionality, and don't hesitate to reach out for support or feedback.