Imagine a scenario where a developer needs to test a newly created feature. In an ideal world, a test environment closely matching production and according to their needs is automatically created for them. They don’t have to open a ticketing system request and wait. When they are done testing, and this environment is no longer needed, it is scaled down to avoid wasting unused resources. This is the promise of self-service infrastructure!
In this blog post, we will examine self-service infrastructure, its value for organizations that aspire to compete in a fast-paced ecosystem, and how to implement such a system in practice.
At its core, self-service infrastructure allows developers to create, manage, and maintain the necessary infrastructure resources without relying on external teams or manual approvals. To achieve this, development teams have access to a central pool of necessary pre-configured tools and processes defined at the organizational level, which we usually refer to as a platform.
A central platform engineering team is responsible for developing this platform, which provides the infrastructure's self-service components. This team is also responsible for selecting the tools, defining standards and guardrails, creating abstractions, and maintaining the platform.
In order to build this one-stop platform to enable developers, the platform team curates templates and sane defaults according to best practices, ensures enterprise security standards, leverages techniques such as GitOps, and adopts IaC, orchestration, and automation tools. Standard tools found in such implementations include version control systems, IaC tools, continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, monitoring, observability, and security tooling.
Automation is key to enabling true self-service. This includes replacing manual approvals with policy-based checks and providing orchestration with GitOps workflows.
Over the previous years, DevOps and cloud infrastructure teams have faced several challenges that have created bottlenecks in the software development lifecycle. The infrastructure complexity these teams managed kept growing, often involving environments spanning multiple geographical regions, cloud providers, and hybrid setups.
As infrastructure complexity and size grew, these teams had to effectively maintain scalability, flexibility, and cost-efficiency. In addition, they are often much smaller than development teams, leading to an overflow of tasks, especially when development teams scale.
Adding to the issues, many organizations still have ticket-based workflows that require human intervention and cause delays. Manual provisioning processes or a lack of scalable infrastructure can also cause significant delays in development and deployment. Complex or poorly designed automation processes sometimes slow the delivery of new features or updates. Lastly, integrating and ensuring security into the DevOps process without compromising speed and agility remains challenging for many organizations.
Implementing self-service infrastructure can bring numerous benefits to organizations.
By allowing developers to provision and manage resources independently, self-service infrastructure reduces wait times and eliminates dependencies on other teams. Self-service platforms foster better communication and collaboration between development and operations teams, breaking down silos. Self-service infrastructure empowers developers to experiment and innovate more freely by removing barriers to resource access.
Self-service capabilities enable quicker resource provisioning, eliminating bottlenecks and reducing waiting times. The ability to quickly provision resources enables faster experimentation and prototyping, which leads to more rapid development cycles and allows teams to innovate and deploy faster. This results in reduced time to market for new features and products.
Through various mechanisms, self-service infrastructure leads to more efficient resource utilization and cost savings. On-demand resource allocation helps organizations optimize infrastructure usage and reduce overall operational costs. Resources can be provisioned and de-provisioned as needed, eliminating waste from idle or underutilized infrastructure.
Even more, organizations can enforce cost-effective practices across all projects by offering pre-approved templates and configurations. Self-service infrastructure implementations also improve cost visibility to end users, providing monitoring and reporting mechanisms for tracking resource usage enabling more informed decision-making about infrastructure investments.
With self-service platforms, security and platform teams can consistently enforce and automate security policies and compliance standards across all provisioned resources. By centrally enforcing security best practices, organizations can minimize the use of unauthorized tools and services that may pose security risks by providing an approved, easy-to-use platform.
Self-service capabilities allow organizations to scale their development efforts and teams more efficiently without increasing the size of their operations teams. These platforms can dynamically allocate resources, supporting the rapid scaling of applications and services.
The combination of faster development cycles, cost optimization, and improved scalability enables organizations to respond more quickly to market changes and maintain a competitive edge.
To successfully implement self-service infrastructure in your organization, consider the following steps.
Evaluate existing workflows, tools, and pain points to identify areas where self-service can impact most. Establish specific, measurable objectives for your self-service infrastructure implementation, such as reducing provisioning time or increasing developer satisfaction. By setting clear goals, you can better measure the success of your implementation and make data-driven decisions for improvements.
Select appropriate tools and platforms that align with your organization's needs and existing technology stack. Consider options that provide self-service catalogs, powerful automation and orchestration capabilities, and specialized self-service platforms, such as StackGuardian. Some popular tools to consider leveraging include Terraform for infrastructure as code (IaC), Ansible for configuration management, and Kubernetes for container orchestration.
After selecting the IaC tools of your preference, such as Terraform or CloudFormation, completely automate the resource provisioning and management with CI/CD and specialized self-service platforms such as StackGuardian. Automation is key to reducing manual errors, improving consistency, and enabling true self-service capabilities for developers
While developing your self-service infrastructure setup, focus on user-friendly flows and design intuitive dashboards and catalogs that make it easy for developers to access and manage resources. An important aspect of any platform’s success is regularly gathering user feedback and iterating on the design to improve usability.
Establish clear boundaries and policies for resource provisioning to ensure proper resource usage, cost control, and security compliance. Integrate and implement automated checks for sensitive operations and enforce security best practices through policy-as-code tools, such as Open Policy Agent (OPA).
Invest in comprehensive training and documentation to drive adoption and enable developers to use the platform effectively. This includes developing quick-start guides and tutorials for everyday tasks, promoting the benefits of self-service, and recognizing teams that leverage the platform.
Continuously monitor usage patterns, gather feedback, and iterate on your self-service offerings to improve efficiency and user satisfaction. This is not a process that you “set and forget” but a continuous improvement journey. By consistently refining your self-service infrastructure, you can ensure it remains valuable and aligned with your organization's evolving needs.
Although self-service infrastructure offers many benefits, organizations also face several challenges. Creating a robust self-service platform is not an easy feat. It often requires significant upfront investments in terms of time and resources. Even after you have finished your initial platform development, all its components, such as templates and configurations, need regular updates to stay current with evolving technologies and organizational needs.
Finding the right balance between agility and developer freedom versus control and maintaining security can be tricky in practice. Another common challenge during such projects is that moving to a self-service model requires a cultural shift within an organization, especially for bigger organizations that are used to operating a certain way.
StackGuardian offers a comprehensive, one-platform solution for implementing and managing self-service infrastructure. It empowers development teams while maintaining governance and control.
StackGuardian's Discover module offers a central hub for quick insights into your organization's cloud infrastructure health. It performs automated checks on your cloud infrastructure, providing actionable insights into cost, security, and compliance best practices with intuitive and pre-configured dashboards. This allows teams to gain clear visibility into their existing resources and identify areas for improvement.
The Develop module enables the creation of guardrails and IaC blueprints based on discovered insights or pre-defined best practices. This ensures that developers can find templates and define policies in a self-service fashion.
StackGuardian's Deploy module leverages self-service capabilities to deploy infrastructure blueprints using a no-code interface or integration with GitOps workflows. This process enforces policies and deploys IaC blueprints, maintaining compliance throughout the deployment lifecycle. StackGuardian integrates with major public cloud providers, CI/CD tools, and version control systems.
The platform offers a no-code interface for effective collaboration on IaC workloads, making it easier for developers to access and manage infrastructure resources with an orchestrator without deep expertise in infrastructure management. StackGuardian's SGMarketplace provides access to pre-defined or customized IaC templates, enabling rapid deployment of common infrastructure patterns.
Get started with StackGuardian today!
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In this blog post, we explored the promise of self-service infrastructure for an organization, discussed its benefits, and discussed practical tips for getting started. Finally, we analyzed how a specialized AI-powered IaC automation and orchestration platform such as StackGuardian helps organizations implement a robust self-service infrastructure model that empowers developers, maintains governance, and accelerates the software development lifecycle.
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