DevOps and developer portals, what is important to consider? Why would containers and cloud utilization be necessary for developer portals? Why own the infrastructure management and deployment tools for your developer portal?
At Pronovix, our goal is to help customers align their devportal needs with their API strategy. We do this by first delivering a rapid response prototype or a basic developer portal. Then, we continue to engage with customers as part of a long-term relationship to align with their developer experience, operational, or business driven needs. Our customers’ API and integration teams have the freedom to focus on their products while working with us to iterate on their longer term developer portal road map.
As part of our developer portal as a service offer we offer 24/7 support packages including site updates, application support, monthly service reports, root cause analysis (RCA) for critical issues, and peer reviews and fixes. Further, Pronovix infrastructure team creates its own custom DevOps workflows based on customer requirements.
This is all thanks to the flexible development and deployment workflow provided by our hosting partner amazee.io.
Our customers, the devportal and web infrastructure teams we work with often have requirements around:
- Where to host
- Cloud Services, Containers, and Kubernetes
- Infrastructure management & deployment tools
In this article, we will attempt to explain how you benefit from taking advantage of flexible development and deployment workflows for your developer portal.
Where to host your DevPortal
A month ago, Pronovix and amazee.io teamed up to carry out a webinar titled “DevPortal as a Service wherever the customer needs it”. We discussed Pronovix’ DevPortal as a Service offering that relies on amazee.io’s open source WebOps platform and services. By partnering with amazee.io we can deploy into high availability clusters, and we can also deploy DevPortals into Kubernetes clusters around the world, in all the most popular cloud providers, or even in a customer’s on-premises cluster if required.
The webinar covered:
- Benefits of a DevPortal for enterprises and how it fits into their multi-cloud strategy
- Ease of use and the benefits for the individual developer
- How amazee.io supports the deployment of DevPortals by leveraging the open source application delivery platform Lagoon
- How to assure stringent security protocols
- Collaboration insights between Pronovix and amazee.io
Speakers: Bastian Widmer (Platform Lead and Partner at amazee.io), Kristof Van Tomme (CEO and Co-founder at Pronovix), and Jan Mashat (Technical Project Manager at Pronovix).
Sign up for our devportal newsletter or check out our webinars page to find out about our latest webinars!
Cloud Services, Containers, and Kubernetes
With the growth of cloud adoption, most of our customers are now using cloud services by GCP, Azure, and AWS. Many customers have also started to adopt container technologies, mainly Kubernetes. This has opened up a new opportunity for us to not only help our customers address security restrictions that steered them towards on-premise setups in the past, but also to address a number of new advanced needs that our customers face:
- Comply with organizational directive to utilize discounted cloud resources on an existing cloud contract
- Host the devportal on a virtual private cloud network managed by our customers
- Take advantage of economies of scale when deploying multiple devportals
- Deploy clusters in different regions to address regulatory constraints (e.g. data residency requirements)
- When necessary, deploy individual devportals in bespoke on-prem clusters, using the same infrastructure that already manages larger, more economical hosting clusters
For Pronovix, these tools allow us to make use of non-PHP/Drupal based solutions that meet customer needs for additional services. For example, having a PDF generator within a developer portal context.
Having access to container technologies amplifies and accelerates the opportunities for customers to build business solutions within their API infrastructure to create more value for their organizations.
Infrastructure Management & Deployment Tools
Pronovix’ DevOps team and customer DevOps teams have the same access to UI options under amazee.io’s Lagoon. Lagoon, a cluster management solution, provides graphical interfaces to:
- Create and manage projects
- View environments
- Create and manage deploy tasks
- View the deployment history
- Download backups
Practically, this means customers have the option of owning the infrastructure management and deployment tools.
Pronovix is able to use Lagoon to deploy in our customers’ clusters without having to access the cluster. We are also working with amazee.io on making it easier for GCP, AWS, Azure customers that need cloud utilization for a large cloud contract to host in their respective project.
So how do you benefit?
This article outlines the importance of having flexible development and deployment workflows for your developer portal(s). From our perspective, having access to container technologies amplifies and accelerates our ability to build business solutions that create more value for our customers.
The WebOps platform of amazee.io is available to everyone. Partnering or working with amazee.io can also bring you all of the benefits we have mentioned above. Get in touch with amazee.io.
amazee.io is an expert in cloud utilization. amazee.io built the open source Lagoon interface to solve complex hosting requirements and simplify web development and maintenance. Through Lagoon developers are equipped with better deployment processes, and a Docker-based environment that uses Kubernetes.
Contact us at Pronovix for more information on hosted or on-premise developer portal solutions.
