As the automation surface area grows to accommodate hundreds of interconnected APIs on the cloud, developers are using their own, home-grown “digital duct tape” to manage a growing “DevOps dumping ground”. For a lot of organizations, home-grown glue logic is inconsistent, not repeatable, and expensive to maintain hundreds of event-based workflows and thousands of combinations. We believe that the answer lies in automation workflows. In particular, workflows-as-code that can be triggered by events. We want to replace engineers’ home-grown digital duct tape with reusable, event-driven workflows.
In an effort to deal with ad-hoc deployments and devops infrastructure CI/CD management, many devs try to create their own one-off automation tools or integration hubs, usually per team or per project.
Examples include:
- Using Lambda and writing functions for EC2 management tasks
- Running scheduled jobs for EBS cleanup
- Repurposing a CI/CD tool like Jenkins for incident response workflows
But this “dumping ground” current approach is Inefficient, expensive, and risky.
- Inefficient because work is done as one-offs that last forever, no reusability or repeatability
- Expensive because spending time building tools and integrations aren’t directly delivering customer value
- Risky because sidestepping governance to get stuff done can lead to exposure and failures
This presentation from Melissa Sussmann at Puppet gives viewers a peek into the beta version of Relay, a product for managing containerized apps. This presentation goes over what the team has learned in the process of working on Relay, the underpinnings of the product, and demonstrates a few example workflows to help you save time and money.
