Facets.Cloud mentioned in the Gartner^® Hype Cycle^™ for Platform Engineering, 2024 report!

Why Self-Service Matters in Environment Management?

Consider a development team developing a new approach to improve the performance of a couple of their systems. They wish to test their new architectural changes consisting of a branch and a new database/cache in a feature environment without affecting the regular testing.

Would they be able to set it up without calling the Platform team? How long will it take? How fast will the team be able to iterate configuration changes? How similar the setup will be to the other environments? Can they promote these changes to regular testing environments with complete confidence?

And finally, how many such projects will the Ops team be able to support?

Minimizing the wait time of Developers is one of the key reasons to promote self-service environment management. The benefits, however, don’t stop there –

“There are three ways organizations can realize business value from self-service environment management tools. First, they help improve developer experience and minimize wait times on other teams, leading to overall business agility. Second, this approach helps codify governance policies as part of environment creation, addressing security, cost, and operations concerns upfront. Third, they lower the barrier for continuous testing of functional and non-functional requirements, leading to improved reliability.” – Says Manjunath Bhat and Bill Blosen in the report

How to achieve Self-service Environment Management

Self-service Environment management requires Platform Teams to provide “Environment-as-a-service” for the Developers. Theoretically, one may believe that staying in the infrastructure automation will eventually morph into self-service. Practically, it doesn’t.

Here is why -

And finally, how many such projects will the Ops team be able to support?

Different facets of creation of an environment is split across automation code (Terraform), release management systems, observability tools, access management systems and such. Centralizing all information accurately, mutating over time and using it to derive new environments requires special consideration for Platform engineers.

Here are 3 key considerations for the Platform Engineers

• Productize infrastructure automation it so that developers can use them to manage lifecycle of the environments

• Provide a developer experience layer (UI or CLI based) so it can be used effectively

• Oversee the effectiveness through a governance framework

How does Facets.Cloud help?

Facets.Cloud provides a developer operated, centrally governed platform for self-service environment management.

Features

• Define: Centralize and mutate all aspects of environments (Blueprint) in a git repository.

• Automate: Link Facets automation pack or bring your existing automations.

• Launch: create consistent environments of various types Dev, QA, Load Test, Feature Test environments. Launch environments on any cloud.

• Environment lifecycle management: Manage environment lifecycles from a single interface.

• Shift-left debugging: Provide your developers Shift-left environment operations, e.g., using AI driven Kubernetes management

Customer Experiences

“There is a video from Spotify, that talks about aligned autonomy in an ideal engineering team. This means giving power to the teams to manage their entire software lifecycle from the get-go, where they control the development, deployment, performance, and infrastructure. But with this, alignment to the guardrails is also very important. One thing that really struck me about Facets was how beautifully it was fitting into this particular vision." - ” said Suyash, CTO, Purplle.com. Find the link to the case study here.

Purplle uses cost-effective developer managed sandbox environments for accelerated testing. This has resulted in 25X faster go-lives of feature launches with spending 70% less on non-production environments.

Additional Resources

Explore our resources to understand the benefits of self-serve environment management.

Purplle uses cost-effective developer managed sandbox environments for accelerated testing. This has resulted in 25X faster go-lives of feature launches with spending 70% less on non-production environments.

• Blog Posts: What is a Developer Self-Service Platform and Why Does it Matter?

• Case Studies: Case Studies

• Documentation: Documentation

Gartner Disclaimer

Gartner, Hype Cycle for Platform Engineering, 2024, By Manjunath Bhat, Bill Blosen, 19 June 2024

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