Summary
The State of DevOps report 2020 found that the most mature DevOps teams have adopted a self-service development platform model. This platform is managed by a dedicated platform team (not the broader Ops team), and is used to enable a self-service experience for application developers who need to run the code they write.
However, building and managing such a platform is a complex process that requires developers and the platform team to be unified in their efforts. Weave GitOps is a solution that brings development and Platform teams together so they can build self-service workflows.
What it Does
Previously, developers would raise an IT ticket for the resources they needed and wait until the Ops team processes this request. In other cases the developer had to tinker with the infrastructure resulting in code delays or worse troubleshooting operational hiccups. This usually involves a lot of back and forth, and results in lower deployment frequency as well as slower time to market. With the platform model, the platform team creates pre-approved templates, configurations, and resources available to application developers. Such approach eliminates the need for developers to raise a ticket requesting resources. Instead, they can simply select a pre-approved template, or environment and spin it up in minutes. Operators can completely automate and quicken the process of resource creation and revolutionize how DevOps teams build software.
Our goal is to give every product team the ability to deploy their changes to our modern strategic platforms in a simple, compliant and repeatable manner. - Mae Large, Architecture Manager at State Farm
The self-service model gives application developers the autonomy and speed they crave for. At the same time, it gives the operator the ability to focus on improving the platform at scale for all teams within the organization, rather than performing manual tasks on repeat. Ultimately both teams accelerate time from commit to deploy all within security and compliance guardrails.
Weave GitOps Enterprise is a solution to build and manage an internal development platform that is powered by cloud-native technologies such as Kubernetes. It is also based on modern development practices such as GitOps.
One of my team’s biggest principles is to provide a self-service platform for our engineers. GitOps is making this possible. - Steve Wade, Platform Lead, Mettle
Weave GitOps Enterprise combines state-of-the-art GitOps principles into a single system. The core principles of GitOps involve managing the entire system in a declarative way. All configuration and resources are defined in Git repositories. A GitOps agent then ensures the desired state as described in Git is applied in production. It routinely checks for changes and updates to any repositories and automatically reconciles the current state to the desired state of the system. (Read more about GitOps in our Guide to GitOps.)
For Kubernetes, Gitops provides a simple audit trail that is invaluable in figuring out what has broken. Flux (and our Tidebot) give our developers a low-risk self-deployment option. Together, Flux and GitOps accelerate our innovation. - Derrick Burns, Backend Engineer, Tidepool
Weave GitOps Enterprise's Workspaces takes self-service to the next level by delivering multi-tenant, isolated environments for each team. Development teams enjoy autonomy to manage and run the applications they build, and use their preferred tool chain.
Our internal systems are as diverse as the teams that operate them. Yet, thanks to Weave GitOps, each team has autonomy to choose their own tech stack, and teams share best practices with each other. - Florian Heubeck, MediaMarktSaturn
What are the benefits?
There are many benefits to a self-service platform approach. These benefits cut across team lines and result in the entire organization being more streamlined and efficient:
- Greater developer velocity resulting in more frequent releases and faster time-to-market
- Reduced human errors, thanks to automation
- Improved alignment between Dev and Ops priorities
- Improvements to the platform don't benefit just one team, but the entire organization
- Enhanced end user experience as new releases are stable and performant
At a time when delivering cloud-native applications is becoming more complex, a self-service approach to development eases software delivery. Weave GitOps is a critical part of the journey as organizations look to move from low and mid-maturity levels with DevOps to high maturity (Learn more about how GitOps boosts business performance).
Find out More
If you want to learn more about self-service models for developers and operators, you can download our latest whitepaper that talks about:
- The four key metrics every DevOps team should track
- The adoption of the platform model by high-performing DevOps Teams
- Building self-service platforms with GitOps
- The comparison of a GitOps platform vs. a non-ops platform
- The easiest way to get started with GitOps
Or schedule a demo to see Weave GitOps Enterprise, a comprehensive solution for organizations that need to deploy software more frequently, and predictably. It empowers developers with the ability to choose or create their own stack, and frees up operators from manual tasks, allowing them to work on strategic improvements that benefit all development teams across the organization. Let us show you how GitOps changes the way your organization builds and ships software.