The past decade has witnessed a seismic shift in the software industry, particularly in the adoption of DevOps practices. What brought us here? The explosion of cloud services, and the changing development practices of companies trying to take advantage of these services.
What was once a niche approach embraced by only 16% of organizations has skyrocketed to an astounding 83% adoption rate today. This transformation has fundamentally changed how developers interact with cloud infrastructure, and has resulted in a new category of general purpose tools called Configuration Platforms. So what is a Configuration Platform?
From ClickOps to Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
In the early days, configuring cloud infrastructure often meant clicks through console interfaces. While this approach was manageable for small-scale operations, it quickly became untenable as organizations scaled their adoption of cloud services. The introduction of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) revolutionized this space, allowing developers to define and manage infrastructure using code — leading to more consistent and repeatable deployments.
However, with the explosive growth of cloud services, the complexity of configuration parameters has increased exponentially. Developers are now tasked with navigating a labyrinth of options, each critical to the performance, security, and cost-effectiveness of their applications.
Developers at the Helm of Cloud Deployment
With DevOps culture permeating businesses, developers are no longer just writing application code: they are also infrastructure architects writing infrastructure as code. This shift means they are making crucial configuration decisions that have far-reaching implications: across security, stability, scalability, and beyond.
While this empowers teams to move faster, it also introduces new challenges that can't be ignored.
The Limitations of Existing Tooling
Today, configuration management is often handled with a patchwork of homegrown tools. The rapid rise of DevOps and IaC meant that a unified framework for configuration was not possible.
As the market has developed, Terraform modules have become a popular choice for defining and configuring infrastructure, offering reusable components that can simplify deployments. However, they come with their own problems: they don’t scale, require infrastructure as code know-how, and become unmaintainable.
Older configuration management tools like Ansible, while still in use, don't fully address the needs of modern cloud-native environments. They often lack support for the highly customizable cloud services of today, and like Terraform modules don’t scale. These tools tend to operate in silos, neglecting to give developers input making collaboration and standardization across teams difficult.
Team organization
Modern organizations with software as their core product, or key internal software tools supporting their business, are typically organized with small central teams who are responsible for their cloud platform. These teams serve large developer populations at a ratio of 20:1 or 30:1.
This has resulted in central teams frequently becoming a bottleneck for software developers who are growing their responsibilities as a result of the DevOps shift.
The Problem: A Complexity Overload
Developers, and the companies they support as an extension, find themselves in a tough spot. They're expected to deliver features rapidly while also mastering an ever-growing list of cloud services with heterogeneous properties, supported by toolsets that doesn’t quite fit the bill. This complexity leads to two primary issues:
- Platform Instability: Misconfigurations can result in system outages or, worse, data breaches that can cost companies millions
- Decreased Productivity: Time spent wrestling with inadequate tools is time not spent on building features that add value to the business, both for developers and central support teams (platform, security, cost, etc.)
Introducing the Configuration Platform
With DevOps adoption now ubiquitous and increasing platform instability and lost productivity, there's a growing need for a new category of tools: the Configuration Platform. But what exactly does this entail?
A Configuration Platform is a centralized system that streamlines the definition of cloud resources. The goal of these tools is to ensure scalable, reliable, and secure cloud platforms while improving developer experience and productivity.
But how to accomplish this?
Configuration Platforms must empower developers to self-serve configuration without needing to be an expert in the cloud services they are configuring, or the declarative tools used to configure them (Terraform, Helm Charts, Kubernetes, etc.). They should take advantage of the benefits of these IaC languages (version control, reviews, pipelines) without requiring developers to be experts in those languages.
These centralized Configuration Platforms must have:
- Assisted Configuration: Configuration Platforms should give central teams a way to build self-serve interfaces for developers, that generate proper configuration. These interfaces include but are not limited to forms, natural language interfaces, or developer tool integrations (VSCode plugins, etc.)
- Policy Enforcement: Integrates guardrails and best practices directly into the development workflow, preventing misconfigurations before they reach production by surfacing policies to developers and enforcing them as part of change management.
- Maintainability: Central teams are responsible for opinionated configuration and related best practices. Configuration Platforms must be easy for central teams to maintain, with features such as Terraform providers, versioning, autocompleting, built-in knowledge graphs, etc.
- Scalability: Configuration platforms must adapt to the growing complexity and scale of modern cloud environments without adding unnecessary overhead. Features such as search, tagging, organization, and discoverability are key to supporting large teams with robust cloud environments.
- Extensibility: Offers integration points with existing tools and services, ensuring it fits seamlessly into the current ecosystem. Key integration points are with version control, change management, and existing execution tools such as Terraform runners.
The Benefits of Adopting a Configuration Platform
Embracing a Configuration Platform can lead to transformative benefits for both developers and organizations:
- Enhanced Developer Experience: Simplifies the configuration process, allowing developers to focus on writing code rather than wrestling with infrastructure.
- Increased Productivity: Streamlines workflows and reduces the time spent on troubleshooting and rework, for both developers and central teams.
- Empowered Platform Teams: Frees up platform and operations teams to focus on high-value tasks like optimizing performance and driving innovation.
- Improved Stability: Reduces the risk of misconfigurations that can lead to outages or security incidents.
- Shift to Innovation: With less time spent on mundane tasks, teams can experiment and innovate more freely, driving the business forward instead of troubleshooting failure.
Conclusion
The evolution of DevOps has placed developers in a pivotal role, making critical configuration decisions that impact the entire organization. While existing tools have bridged some gaps, they fall short in addressing the complexities of today's cloud environments. This can result in cloud stability issues and a negative impact to developer experience.
A Configuration Platform represents the next step in this evolution, offering an interface for building self-service infrastructure configuration that benefits developers, platform teams, and the organization as a whole. By adopting a Configuration Platform, companies can achieve a both speed and stability instead of having to make a choice between the two: paving the way for sustained innovation and growth.
Resourcely is the world’s premier Configuration Platform. Try it out for yourself today for free!
