Core Platform History

The Core Platform is a full developer platform, usable out of the box, on GCP (see roadmap for other cloud support) based on the lessons learned from CECG’s consulting arm building large scale developer platforms at big enterprises.

The big project miletones were:

  • Inception: initial agreement with initial beta customer to adopt the platform as we build it
  • Dev Onboarding: unblocking developers with environments and pipelines
  • Full Onbaording: guarantee that environments will be long-lived and not rebuilt
  • Production Ready: ready for production worklods, CECG migrates its first production app onto its instance
  • Devex: after production ready, focus on onboarding experience and operations with a new CLI

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2023 Q3

The product was kicked off in August 2023. With the following milestones set based on:

  • Unblocking app developers as soon as possible < 2 weeks
  • Unblock app developers doing a full path to production < 3 months
  • Prove out the operations model of a user platform operator deploying new versions
  • Final set of long-lived environments in < 3 months
  • Production ready in < 6 months

This was an aggressive set of milestones but achieveable given the engineers working on the Core Platform have built developer platforms many times.

Dev Playground (Week 2)

  • GCP environment up and running (light weight GCP landing zones)
  • Each dev can have its own tenancy (namespace) to develop their own application
  • Deploy and run apps in K8s cluster
  • Reference applications including basic CI/CD

Dev Environment Not-Live (Month 1)

  • Ability to access deployed services through a URL
  • Resource utilisation and platform health monitoring

All Environments Not-Live (PreDev, Dev, Prod) (Month 3)

  • DevOps engineer will be able to deploy platform upgrades and test changes before releasing them to developers and into production
  • Platform metrics such as uptime and latency, exposed via dashboards and alerts
  • Detect platform configuration issues
  • Tenants will be able to view logs and custom metrics for their deployed applications

By the end of the quarter the following milestones were met:

  • Dev Playground (Week 2)
  • Dev Environment Not-Live (Month 1)

All Environments Live (PreDev, Dev, Prod) (Month 6)

2023 Q4

The following milestones were met on time:

  • All Environments Not-Live (PreDev, Dev, Prod), including but not limited to:
    • Cloud Access - the ability for workloads to access cloud workloads outside of the platform securely without passwords
    • Slack integration for alerts
    • Consolidated Alerting Dashboard
    • Ingress - expose services over TLS

2024 Q1

The following milestones were met on time:

  • All Environments Live (PreDev, Dev, Prod)
  • CECG’s first production workload running on its instance of the platform

The Core Platform is now ready for production.

2024 Q2

  • A big focus on improving developer experience and introducing the Platform CLI CoreCtl
  • Autoscaling!
  • Tenant monitoring stack
  • Tenant support for using k6 for load testing

2024 Q3

  • Multi tenent access to secrets in GCP Secret Manager
  • Static NAT IPs