Empower Teams with Self-Serve Cloud Infrastructure

CHALLENGE

Organizations need to increase their velocity and remove bottlenecks

In most organizations, there are different teams working on the infrastructure. Either building it, maintaining it, managing security, FinOps or simply using it to deploy applications.

This means, based on how teams collaborate, developers, data engineers/scientist and product team rely on DevOps / cloud architects / platform team to build and maintain their infrastructure. This dependency naturally creates a bottleneck.

This bottleneck has different root causes:

The product team is not an expert in IaC/Terraform and doesn’t have time to learn it, as it is not part of their primary responsibilities, and they have their own deadlines to meet.
The business constantly pushes for increased velocity, reduced time to market, and the quick delivery of what has been promised to customers.
Cloud architects & DevOps spend more than 30% of their time supporting other teams. In some companies, more than 50% of the time of DevOps engineers is spent on the support.
In other words, they don’t have enough time to build a complete solution from scratch to solve this issue since they are busy building, maintaining, troubleshooting and helping others.

What companies are doing to solve this issue?

Use modules extensively and build automation around it. However, the challenge remains for users: understanding how to use these modules and combine them to build their infrastructure.
Some companies create an internal portal with automation, allowing users to provision their infrastructure automatically through forms and questionnaires. The primary challenge here is maintaining the portal and upgrading it to integrate the latest Terraform changes, optimize costs, and ensure security.
Create IaC template in Git, so they are easily cloned and used. This is a good solution, but the most important issue is: How teams know what are all the templates to use and how to use them. So, they tend to reinvent the wheel inside every team.
Another approach is to create Infrastructure as Code (IaC) templates in Git, making them easy to clone and use. While this solution is effective, a significant issue arises: How can teams know about the available templates and their usage. This leads to teams frequently 'reinventing the wheel' within their own groups.

SOLUTION

Self serve model with a centralized service catalog and governance

We are moving more and more into a cloud native world where the architecture of the application and the architecture of the infrastructure are almost the same, we need to have a centralized self serve model where users can:

Autonomously browse the catalog
See what has been built
Move faster by having either use-cases implemented or giving them building block that they can easily compose them to build bigger infrastructure when needed.

This producer-consumer model where the producer or publisher is a team building approved use-cases (with best practices, naming conventions, security and FinOps). It publishes these templates into a service catalog for consumers to pick the right architecture and easily deploy it.

Brainboard has been build for this specific purpose, where you have a central place that hosts your processes, cloud maturity and people working on them:

Engineers can collaboratively build secure-by-design cloud architectures.
The smart cloud designer has built-in capabilities that help users build quicker and more accurately.
Create a service catalog by publishing approved and validated architectures. This serves as a repository for reliable and standardized designs.
Manage the lifecycle of the approved templates and keep them up to date. You can define CI/CD pipelines & workflows that continuously check the templates for security and compliance.
Actively manage the lifecycle of these approved templates to ensure they remain relevant and up-to-date. Implement CI/CD pipelines and workflows that continually assess the templates for security and compliance.
Integrate custom-defined modules and blocks into these templates. This not only makes them versatile and adaptable but also ensures they are shared and utilized by a wider audience.
Enhance governance and control measures to significantly improve security.

This self-serve model is optimized to increase your velocity on both ends:

Consumers can build fast with security and costs in mind
End users are autonomous and are not blocked by another team handling the infrastructure for them.

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Cloud infrastructure self-serve model

Organizations need to increase their velocity and remove bottlenecks

What companies are doing to solve this issue?

Self serve model with a centralized service catalog and governance

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Standardize IaC

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