Cycloid today extended its platform for managing and governing software engineering workflows to provide DevOps teams with more granular control over how stacks of software components are constructed and managed.
Company founder Benjamin Brial said a Components capability now makes it possible to configure individual components using its Stack Form infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tool. That more modular approach will enable DevOps and platform engineering teams to more easily mix and match components on their own versus being dependent on stacks of components pre-defined by Cycloid that are hosted within its internal developer portal (IDP).
While most organizations don’t want to build and maintain their own DevOps platform, they do want to be able to customize and extend those platforms as they best see fit in a way that decouples stacks from specific projects, said Brial. The Components capability enables that middle ground to be achieved and maintained using a Git repository, he said.
Instead, a single project can now contain multiple, distinct components, each linked to a specific environment and stack of software. That’s critical in an era where most applications are increasingly made up of reusable microservices that organizations are mixing and matching using their existing GitOps workflows as needed, noted Brial.
A Cycloid InfraView tool then provides the centralized view of the components of an application that have been stored in a Git repository to make it simpler to track elements of an application as it is continuously updated.
In general, organizations are increasingly embracing platform engineering as a methodology for managing software engineering at scale. Most of those efforts are being led by existing DevOps teams, but there are a small number of organizations that have set up a separate dedicated platform engineering team, said Brial. However, most organizations are not inclined to hire a separate platform engineering team simply because the additional labor costs would be too high, he added.
Each organization will need to decide which path makes the most sense for itself, but the one thing that is clear is that DevOps workflows are becoming more centralized as part of an effort to better scale software engineering processes in a way that also reduces costs. The challenge is achieving that goal in a way that doesn’t result in a set of overly inflexible processes that application developers will ultimately find a way to workaround.
Of course, it may now only be a matter of time before the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) coding tools forces the platform engineering issue. As software engineering teams expand to include data scientists, data engineers and additional cybersecurity professionals, the number of IT professionals that are participating in the management of more software builds than ever is only going to increase. Legacy DevOps workflows were not designed to manage code bases that will soon be exponentially larger than anyone might have once envisioned.
Hopefully, those decisions will be made before any crisis ensues, but given the history of software development, it’s likely there will be plenty of speed bumps ahead that most organizations will, despite all best intentions, still likely hit head on.
