Point of View: Why configure8

We now live in a world of software development sprawl. 

#SprawlHappens

Modern distributed cloud architectures enable development teams to ship more features, more often, using more third-party libraries, services, and tools than ever before. Now, teams are faster, more nimble, and more responsive than ever to customer needs and market opportunities.  All of this “more” has created what’s known as development sprawl.

Development sprawl is the pain associated with managing, maintaining, documenting and communicating about every part of your cloud architecture, such as distributed codebases, libraries, services, and tools. 

The result of sprawl is toil associated with finding and analyzing the knowledge necessary to understand, operate and improve an organization. 

As organizations transform around distributed cloud architectures, developers are increasingly being asked not only to write code but to deploy and operate it as well. Moreover, this code must be reliable, secure and cost-effective to operate. 

Under all these requirements in an organization that faces sprawl, developers are often challenged to:

1. Confidently deploy code
2. Ensure code is reliable, secure, and cost-efficient
3. Be incident ready
4. Onboard new developers efficiently
5. Focus on features and logic, not operations and boilerplate

On the other hand, management and department leaders tend to struggle with the following:

1. How to gather information without interrupting teams
2. Running ad hoc analyses and create KPIs in order to understand security, reliability, performance, cost and staffing as it relates to individual applications and services
3. Engaging your team around architectural, security and consistency standards, and measure the team’s adoption of these standards

So what do we need to help solve the problems associated with Sprawl? An Internal Developer Portal, like configure8.

Here’s how it helps:

• A comprehensively-populated catalog: All the metadata from all your tools in one place, up-to-date automatically.  See reliability, performance, cost, security, and CI/CD metrics as well as ownership, documentation, languages and frameworks, dependency and dependents, and more, all mapped to your applications and services (i.e., services, microservices, serverless functions, libraries, etc.). 
• An infrastructure aware catalog: All your cloud resources (including containers) in one place, unified across clouds and accounts.
• A catalog built on a knowledge graph: The ability to join previously disparate dimensions and log historical data in order to easily answer powerful questions. Start from the point-of-view you need, and traverse from there.

The above capabilities enable your teams to use configure8 to understand and improve.

• Your Destination for Doing and Deciding: A single pane of glass that centrally organizes essential knowledge about your services, tools, teams, and clouds.
• Be Incident Ready: Quickly understand a service, its dependencies and its cloud resources before troubleshooting. Find ownership, runbooks, documentation, SLOs, and recent deployments organized in one place. Create incidents which push data into your on-call system.  Deep link into underlying tools for even more information.
• Deploy with Confidence: Visualize and filter dependencies and dependents for applications, services and serverless functions.  Easily find application and service ownership and documentation. Run readiness reviews to ensure there are runbooks, dashboards, logs, on-call escalation policies, monitoring/alerting, and accountable owners.
• Efficiently Onboard New Hires:  Self-serve, on-demand, always-fresh knowledge in one place to help new hires to ramp quickly and minimize interrupts to your existing team
• Maintain Knowledge in High Employee Turnover Environments: Ensure tribal knowledge migrates to a centralized, living knowledge graph instead of people’s heads so you have a permanent artifact.
• Ensure Reliability, Security and Cost Efficiency:  Run checks tailored to your organization’s standards (coming soon). See reliability, security and cost metrics organized by service. Also, make granular cloud cost information available to developers at the service and application level in order to help them drive down that cost (coming soon).
• Focus on Features and Logic: Get back to focusing on features and logic by organizing information about your applications, services and cross-cloud resources in one place to avoid hunting for information.  Reduce your cognitive load by using a singular platform experience for multiple needs (even as tools change), and deep link into the underlying tool as needed.

Best of all, configure8 fits organizations of any size and budget and delivers value literally in minutes. No need to talk to sales, negotiate a contract, or go through a lengthy set-up process. It’s self-serve (with product advocates available to assist you as you explore, we feature support options from email to white glove, transparent, simple pricing, and our onboarding process requires minimal effort.