IaaT: Infrastructure as a Template

To enhance the speed and quality of the development process, it’s crucial to grant developers substantial independence and avoid bottlenecks for DevOps engineers, even in terms of product infrastructure.

However, when considering the reduction of tools, how does this align with the fact that developers will assume additional responsibility and knowledge for establishing the infrastructure? The answer is: templating.

In the era of platform engineering, the focus is no longer on the maintenance and ongoing work of developers’ infrastructure by DevOps/SRE engineers. Instead, the aim is to produce infrastructure templates that developers can readily utilize — templates that are accessible, easy to maintain, and modifiable.

These templates provide your teams with several benefits:

• Alignment in aspects of architecture, infrastructure, and technologies.
• Maintenance of a standardized naming convention.
• Rapid and easy creation of services without the need for DevOps/SRE engineers.
• Simpler upgrades and updates to the infrastructure; edits are made to the template, and product developers can easily update.

Here are some key principles for effectively managing templates:

• Template Creation: Utilize tools that make template creation easy and can be integrated with CI/CD tools or Portals, such as Jinja or Cookiecutter, to construct the template project.
• Repository: Manage the code in a version control system (SCM) and enable developers to make modifications to the template.
• Release Management: Developers should stay informed about updates and changes in the templates they use. They should also be able to compare these changes with their product easily, facilitating seamless upgrades.
• Portal: Integrate a Portal Scaffolder feature that empowers developers to generate services from templates. This feature ensures that the template-based service creation aligns with your plans, Additionally to that, the Audit logs within the Portal allow you to track service creation and template utilization.

Additional resources:

To learn more about Cookiecutter, visit: https://www.senora.dev/post/how-to-create-your-first-template-using-cookiecutter

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