STANDARDIZATION AND AUTOMATION
Platform engineering is the discipline of designing and building toolchains and workflows that enable self-service capabilities for software engineering organizations in the cloud-native era. Platform engineers provide an integrated product most often referred to as an “Internal Developer Platform” covering the operational necessities of the entire lifecycle of an application. An Internal Developer Platform (IDP) is a layer on top of the tech and tooling an engineering team has in place already. It helps operations structure their setup and enable developer self-service. Platform engineering done right means providing golden paths and paved roads that match the preferred abstraction level of the individual developer, who interacts with the IDP layer. What is Platform Engineering?
What is our aspiration?
Enterprise Systems will standardize and automate widely used processes, technologies, and infrastructure such that it reduces the cost and risk of manual processes and the cognitive load on our staff, allowing them to focus on more value-added tasks.
Why is this important?
Automation and standardization have numerous benefits, such as cost reduction; increased accuracy, efficiency, and security; and elimination of repetitive manual tasks.
With the emergence of IoT, mobile, artificial intelligence, etc., technology stacks have gotten increasingly complex. Development teams are struggling to keep up. Technology silos and inefficient processes within infrastructure teams hinder their productivity.
To reduce cognitive load on our development teams and allow them to focus on value-added tasks, ES must provide a foundational product of self-service APIs, tools, and services that allow developers to work more independently and autonomously. The goal is to completely automate the deployment, monitoring, and management of applications and the infrastructure on which they run.
What are our concrete goals?
- Adopt enterprise platform standards and build a set of software and platform capabilities to support the needs of the development teams.
- Plan, provide, and enhance standard documentation to guide community work and engagement.
- Consolidate and standardize Linux and Windows systems administration.
What specific targets are we setting for ourselves for 2023?
- Adopt enterprise platform standards and build a set of software and platform capabilities to support the needs of the development teams.
- Develop a platform and onboarding process for applications using the ESS Java and .NET architectures.
- Leverage Vault, Rivet 2.0, and GitHub Actions/Azure DevOps for all new development projects.
- Populate and validate infrastructure relationship metadata with application owners.
- Plan, provide, and enhance standard documentation to guide community work and engagement.
- Develop and document a standard for new employee onboarding process.
- Explore, analyze, and recommend standard tools for technical documentation.
- Create and maintain team system maps. Additionally, aggregate system documentation to support Tier 0 and 1 applications and services.
- Consolidate and standardize Linux and Windows systems administration.
- Develop and document an onboarding process for aligned servers for each OS stack.
- Determine and write a recommendation for the standard enterprise Linux OS platform.
- Begin migration of aligned servers into the enterprise platform standard support model.