Cloud stuff

I’ve been a bit reflective due to an IaC task that has become a bit more complex, thus taking me longer to complete than initially anticipated, and I’ve realized there are some aspects I believe have room for improvement. I believe that infrastructure automation and infrastructure state management still have room to mature in order to become more effective. While tools like Terraform and Ansible have come a long way, there are several areas where improvement is needed:

1. Greater Resilience and Enhanced Rollback: Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools could advance by automatically detecting deployment failures and safely rolling back to a previous state without human intervention.

2. Tighter Integration with Cloud Services: IaC tools could integrate even more seamlessly with cloud services, simplifying the management of resources such as databases, load balancers, and container services, thereby streamlining the orchestration of complex infrastructures.

3. Advanced Secrets Management: Effective secrets management is critical in DevOps. IaC tools could enhance the way secrets are handled and stored, providing a more robust security layer and enabling automated secret rotation. I am aware that steps are currently being taken in this direction.

4. Predictive Analysis and Optimization: Tools utilizing predictive analytics to identify infrastructure bottlenecks or performance issues before they become actual problems, allowing for proactive optimization.

5. Improvements in Visualization and Monitoring: More advanced graphical interfaces and real-time monitoring tools that enable DevOps teams to understand and address issues more efficiently.

These are just a few examples IMHO of how maturing automation in infrastructure and state management could benefit DevOps teams in the future.

Organizations must be agile and innovative to stay competitive in today’s software development era, which has led to changes in how applications are built, deployed, and managed.

This necessitates the transformation of static CI/CD setups into modern Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) that provide developers with the tools needed to innovate and move quickly.

While every platform looks different, specific common patterns emerge. To help simplify things, I’ve consolidated the platform designs of dozens of setups into standard patterns based on real-world experiences, which have been proven to work effectively. By adopting these patterns, organizations can create IDPs that keep them ahead of the competition and deliver innovative applications faster.

This diagram provides an overview of one reference architecture for a dynamic IDP using AWS EKS, RDS, Backstage, Humanitec, GitHub Actions, Terraform, and several other technologies.

Design principles.

01 Focus on the user. The most important customers of a developer platform
are developers. Developers need to be heavily involved in the design,
prioritization of features, and testing to ensure the platform is fit for purpose
and fully self-service.

02 Run your platform team like a start-up. Establish a small central team that
owns the platform and is responsible for marketing it, ensuring it is easily consumable and fulfills developers’ needs.

03 Build golden paths vs cages. Developers should be free to choose their
abstraction level. While your IDP should provide a set of golden paths for developers to follow, it should never force their use.

04 Drive standardization by design. Enabling self-service means platform
engineers must define how to vend resources and configuration. This ensures
every resource is built securely, compliant, and well-architected.

05 Implement Dynamic Configuration Management. Dynamic Configuration Management significantly reduces config complexity and enforces standardization by continuously generating app and infrastructure configs with every single deployment. This allows you to enforce policies and standards with every git-push.

06 Let developers decide on their platform interface. The developer
platform should never break your developer’s workflow or force them to use a
specific interface. To support this, a code-based workflow by default works
best, with the option to use a UI, CLI, or API.

07 Keep code as the single source of truth. This ensures everyone is working
from the same version, reducing the risk of errors.

08 Assume a brownfield scenario. Use tools that have already been
productized and adopted by the organization (such as backlog management,
CI/CD toolchain, and container platform) and let the existing teams pursue
integration through plug-ins into the platform. Where applicable, organizations
should use open-source tooling and a cloud-native approach.

Advancements in Infrastructure Automation for Future DevOps Success.

AWS IDP Short reference Architecture