10x the DevEX!
Recently there has been a shift in language surrounding System Reliability Engineering (SRE) and DevOps to Platform Engineering. Granted these terms have been used in various ways for a while, but how language terms are used gives way to how markets evolve. This post provides a few key areas of thought around ways to ultimately get products to production faster. Remember…code means nothing until it’s in production.
No matter the title, anyone in the pipeline touching production code is part of the team of ensuring success of critical applications in an enterprise. This is an important concept because everyone is part of the larger team and how teams work together ultimately determines the success of any project.
The focus here will be on the actual development team who is primarily writing the code. The code in question would be delivered as microservices running on a K8S cluster. Keep in mind the use of microservices will lend itself to multiple teams individually creating a service for other teams to consume. Already there is significant dependencies and a single line of code has yet to be written.
Each team ultimately needs to consume one or more code repositories, one or more “testing” systems, at least one pipeline for continuous integration, continuous delivery/deployment (CI/CD), and many other systems to get code to production.
The Platform Engineering team is ultimately responsible for ensuring the “platforms” are working in a way to support the developers. Ensuring a great experience is paramount.
The question is how do Platform Engineers continually improve the great developer experience? The answer many teams turn to is to create powerful systems with guardrails or opinions on how they are to be utilized based on the collective understanding of the teams modus operandi or how they work most effectively.
The key to how is reducing the repetitive work, the mundane menial tasks which take a toll on the cognitive workload of developers allowing them to be able to focus on writing good, clean code.
Giving the power to the developers to consume what is needed in a self-service fashion is one major step as is giving a limited set of choices in what toolsets to use. Make it easy for developers to build and deliver software without removing the useful capabilities of the core services.
In the ideal world, limit restrictions on the how allowing choices in using GitOps or ClickOps or using a API vs CLI vs UI. Use a “as a service” approach to create a system built iteratively by the entirety of the team based on direct feedback.
What it all comes down to is the fact that everyone has different ways they want to work. Its the platform engineering team who can help ensure all of the tools are available and functional to create a great developer experience which in turn will increase productivity and get new, shiny things to market faster.