Experience – how Will the DevSecOps Experience be Shaped?

What Can I Expect from this Stop?

The Experience stage includes the following topics:

This stage focuses entirely on an ideal experience to enable daily work to be performed as frictionlessly as possible. It is essential to keep the different needs in mind, while simultaneously always remaining within governance and security requirements.

With the help of an IDP (e.g., based on Backstage), it is possible to implement precisely these requirements, for example, with standardized project templates, while simultaneously reducing cognitive load. From a developer’s perspective, one can fully concentrate on implementing the functional requirements, as topics such as CI/CD or security checks are already pre-configured.

To actually begin working on the source code, it is advisable that the development environment also be provided pre-configured. This is where a Cloud Development Environment, such as Coder, comes into play. This enables either direct code editing via a web IDE or by providing Dev Containers to always ensure the same Dev-Experience regardless of the end device.

Such a container not only includes the tooling for the development stack, but also the Inner-Dev-Loop Tooling – such as Tilt or Telepresence – to interact directly with the operating platform. This allows one to execute their own code as close to reality as possible, without having to laboriously set up additional systems like databases or message brokers.

Why should I Stop at this Stop?

Merely introducing a new operating platform does not solve problems; it must be accepted by a broad base and, even better, embraced to achieve sustainable changes.

Acceptance is achieved through an ideal, state-of-the-art experience with the new tooling and platform. This also has the pleasant “side effect” of higher motivation and, in turn, resulting higher productivity.

A state-of-the-art experience also helps attract new talent to the team and keep existing colleagues engaged in their work environment.

If one consistently pursues a self-service or “x-as-a-Service“ mindset, this additionally relieves colleagues, for example, in platform development, as they can fully focus on providing the platform as a product for development or application operations. This also removes potential bottlenecks, as greater independence is achieved between different teams and team types.

How Does this Stop Work?

Although many problems can be solved with the help of various tools, the focus is never on a tool itself, but always on the challenges to be overcome. This approach becomes tangible using Backstage as an example of a platform for creating an Internal Developer Portal (IDP). Backstage is not a finished product, but rather a platform that can be used to implement an IDP with full focus on the needs of a team or company.

We also apply our proven CRAWL-WALK-RUN methodology at this point to deliver the best possible results for our clients in small, iterative steps.

Thus, we have reached the end of the blog series journey. Last year, during the lightning talks at our DevOps Roundtable, an overview of all stages was provided, which we would like to share in this context as a summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAuMzNEnOYE

Now, we look to the future and finally give you a teaser for this year’s DevOps Roundtable, where the FullStackS DevX team will provide an outlook on this stage. We will present nothing less than the future of a true cloud-native DevSecOps experience live.