The last post in the blog post series on the Cloud Native App Journey will focus entirely on what is needed to provide teams with an ideal experience in their own working environment.
It's not just about providing developers with ‘fancy’ tools, but introducing them in a way that reduces the cognitive load, complies with governance and security requirements and, of course, maximises fun at work.
Many aspects of this topic can already be found in the CNCF Platform Engineering Maturity Model. Our DevX team at FullStackS consists exclusively of colleagues who have years of experience in various aspects of DevSecOps. This enables us to cover an even broader spectrum of this topic than is currently defined in Platform Engineering.
What can I expect from this stopover?
The Experience stopover includes the following topics:
Cloud native Inner Dev-Loop
Internal Developer Portal (IDP)
Cloud Development Environment
SW-Project Management
Cloud Native Runtimes
Enablement & Blueprints
Documentation & Guides (docs-as-code)
This stopover focusses entirely on an ideal experience in order to be able to carry out daily work with as little friction as possible. It is essential to keep the different needs in mind, but at the same time always remain within the governance and security guidelines.
With the help of an IDP (e.g. based on Backstage), it is possible to map precisely these specifications with standardised project templates, for example, and reduce the cognitive load at the same time. From a developer's point of view, you can concentrate fully on implementing the technical requirements, as topics such as CI/CD or security checks are already preconfigured.
In order to actually start working on the source code, it makes sense that the development environment is also provided preconfigured. This is where a cloud development environment such as Coder comes into play. This enables the code to be edited either directly via a web IDE or by delivering dev containers to ensure the same dev experience regardless of the end device.
Such a container not only contains the tooling for the development stack, but also the inner-dev-loop tooling - such as Tilt or Telepresence - to interact directly with the operating platform. This makes it possible to execute your own code as realistically as possible without having to set up additional systems such as databases or message brokers.
Why should I stop at this stopover?
The mere introduction of a new operating platform does not solve any problems, it must be accepted by a broad base and, even better, learnt to love it in order to achieve sustainable changes.
Acceptance is achieved through an ideal state-of-the-art experience with the new tooling and platform. This also has the nice ‘side effect’ of higher motivation and, in turn, higher productivity.
A state-of-the-art experience also helps to attract new talent to your team and to continue to inspire existing colleagues in their working environment.
If a self-service or ‘x-as-a-service’ approach is consistently pursued, this also relieves the burden on colleagues in platform development, for example, as they can focus entirely on providing the platform as a product for development or application operation. This also removes any bottle-necks, as greater independence is achieved between different teams and team types.
How does this stopover work?
Although many problems can be solved with the help of various tools, the focus is never on the tool itself, but always on the challenges that need to be overcome. The example of Backstage as a platform for creating an Internal Developer Portal (IDP) makes this process model tangible. Backstage is not a finished product, but a platform that can be used to implement an IDP with a full focus on the needs of a team or company.
We also apply our tried-and-tested CRAWL-WALK-RUN methodology at this point in order to provide the best possible result for our customers in small iterative steps.
We have now reached the end of the blog post series journey. Last year, in the course of the Lightning Talk at our DevOps Roundtable, there was already an overview of all the stopovers, which we would like to share as a summary in this context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAuMzNEnOYE
Now we're looking to the future and finally giving you a teaser of this year's DevOps Roundtable, where the FullStackS DevX team will be giving a preview of this stopover. We will be presenting nothing less than the future of a true cloud native DevSecOps experience live.