Keeping your engineers happy: The Case for Self-Service Tooling

One of the main themes in platform engineering is to codify all things. These teams often find themselves in a position whereby they are flooded with user provisioning requests from ticketing systems, Let’s go over the importance of self-service provisioning tooling to help bring order and peace.

As the technology industry has evolved, the way we build applications has become more complex. We now require many moving parts to develop, test, and deploy our applications within our organizations. Developers like doing things themselves, and prefer not having to rely on a team to provision things for them. It is often time-consuming, and they often find themselves wishing that they could do it themselves, or they find themselves trying to do it themselves and skipping security requirements.

This is why it’s super exciting to see a movement toward self-serve provisioning coming from platform engineering teams. One of the main themes in platform engineering is to codify all the things. While these teams have already typically automated provisioning tasks, they often find themselves in a position whereby they are flooded with user provisioning requests from ticketing systems, which are often manually fulfilled.

This bottleneck becomes a huge waste of everyone’s time. It’s a waste of developers’ time because they are blocked as they wait around for the request to be fulfilled. It’s a waste of the platform engineer’s time, as they could be using that time to improve things such as system reliability.

In this talk, Ana Margarita Medina and Adriana Villela discuss the importance of self-service provisioning tooling to help bring order and peace of mind to developers and platform engineers alike!

Platform engineering has grown in popularity as a way to enable application teams to focus on their customers, while consuming non-differentiating tech from an internal team. Successful platform teams operate as a product team. They collect requirements, identify offerings that provide innovative and easy-to-use solutions to their customers’ problems, and package their offerings in a discoverable and easy-to-use interface. A platform team is successful when they focus on the differentiating tasks (identifying internal challenges/innovative solutions) while leveraging community solutions for commodities like API design and delivery.

The good news is that there are already some of the technologies out there that are helping to make this possible, such as Kratix (packaging/sharing APIs-as-a-service), Loft Labs’ self-service for Kubernetes Namespaces, and RunWhen (workflow sharing and automation).

In short, productizing platform offerings as self-serve tooling provides validation, compliance, and allows organizations and teams to scale, while reducing toil. Because, let’s face it…nobody wants to get lost in a sea of tickets. /// Ana’s past talks: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnNcgiSsTeItmrro8UAa2CAhuW2K9nDyX Adriana’s past talks: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2n5EpcOFZftFNYugZ0HgfJ6e-7uDpuwZ