September 2024 Summaries

The article discusses two tools for building an Internal Developer Platform (IDP): Cortex's developer portal and the Humanitec Platform Orchestrator. It provides a reference architecture for IDP using these tools, focusing on AWS but also available for GCP, Azure, and Red Hat OpenShift. The Humanitec Platform Orchestrator serves as the backend, interpreting declarative requests and generating an executable resource graph. Cortex acts as the frontend, offering features like a service catalog and scorecards. The article outlines how these tools can collaborate effectively in managing intricate application and infrastructure configurations.

A new reference architecture has been developed in collaboration with Red Hat, focusing on delivering "Everything as Code" in GitOps mode. The key paradigms include automating golden paths end-to-end, resource management throughout the lifecycle, separation of presentation and logic layers, sensible abstraction with Score for developers, strict standardization for infrastructure and operations teams, built-in security design, and embracing a philosophy of everything as code. This architecture streamlines user requests by enabling users to remain "in code" and "in the editor," using platforms like GitHub Actions, Humanitec Platform Orchestrator, ArgoCD, and Microsoft Teams for deployment and notification purposes. The frontend is provided by Red Hat's new Developer Hub, which consumes the API of the Platform Orchestrator as its central source of truth.

The introduction of the Catalog of Resource Classes aims to improve discoverability and management of available options for developers in platform engineering. Resource Classes provide a set of options within each resource type, reducing cognitive load on developers while maintaining control over variance for Platform Engineering teams. This solution helps ensure effective self-service capabilities by making resources easily discoverable and accessible to end users.