No Ops? No worries.
Tags: softwareengineering, cloudcomputing, infrastructureascode, opensource
Published: 2023-06-20 15:37:43

Scenario: Your team of developers doesn't have access to a platform engineering team, you need to be creative in how you provision infrastructure and keep your team productive. 

A whole lot of attention is being thrown about developer portals; however, a developer portal wont bring about immediate results. Every minute spent on infrastructure is a minute not spent on providing core value.

The solution? Immediate productivity gains can be obtained through automation. Once you've established a self-service provisioning process, then you can consider setting up a portal to further streamline the process and provide a centralized location for developers to manage their resources.

## Automating infrastructure 


Developer self-service and provisioning are critical to infrastructure management because they allow developers to deploy and manage their own applications and services autonomously, bypassing traditional IT teams and support tickets. This approach increases organizational agility and reduces deployment time.

There are several things you need to take into consideration when trying to build a self-service provisioning process:

- Identify infrastructure needs.
- Choose an infrastructure provider.
- Set up self-service provisioning.

An automation framework can help you solve all of the above challenges so that your team can focus on other tasks, such as writing, testing, and supporting your application. There are a few out there in development, [Nitric](https://nitric.io) is ready to use today.

## Identify infrastructure needs:

Nitric supports some of the most commonly used resources on the cloud. These resources were selected based on analyzing the requirements of hundreds of real-world projects that the team has previously deployed. The supported resources include Compute, Secrets, Documents, Storage, Messaging (Events & Queues), and Schedules.

## Choose an infrastructure provider:

Nitric supports multiple cloud providers, including AWS, GCP, and Azure. This allows you to choose the provider that best fits your needs and provides a consistent experience for developers across different environments. The ability to delay your decision until you are ready to deploy is a huge advantage for those who want to begin development from day one, especially when all of the resources are simulated locally for rapid iterative development.

## Set up self-service provisioning:

Nitric supports self-service provisioning of infrastructure by automatically inferring a specification of infrastructure required by your application directly from your code. This allows you to define your infrastructure as code, which can be version-controlled and automated for faster provisioning and maintenance. The end result is 90% less boilerplate configuration and less brittle provisioning of infrastructure by avoiding the need for a totally separate deployment project.

If you're working on a project without a dedicated infrastructure team, then using a framework with strongly backed opinions about performance, scalability, and security should be your number one focus.