Infrastructure Platform

The Backbone

Infrastructure Platform

The infrastructure platform forms the bedrock upon which the data, ML & AI, and developer platforms are built. It empowers developers to independently and locally iterate on system components while seamlessly connecting to cloud resources when needed.

While the infrastructure platform covers a large swathe of cloud resources, some of the most developer urgent questions it answers are:

  • how do I stand up and configure our different development environments (dev, staging, prod, …)
  • how can I access those cloud environments? what can I access?
  • how do I develop locally against the deployed system (distributed or not)
  • how do I ensure what I develop locally works as expected when I deploy to the cloud?
  • how do I manage secrets locally and in the cloud?
  • how do I access cloud resources that are behind authentication or authorization?
  • how do I spin up and access a database for my project?
  • how can I perform database migrations safely?
  • how can I spin up custom infrastructure?
  • how can I poke around and play with cloud resources in a pre-dev environment?
  • how do I request and grant access to internal artifacts, projects, services or data assets?
  • how do I manage or automate dependency updates?
  • how do I version and release my components?
  • how do I monitor application metrics and logs?
  • how do I configure and control alarms and alerting?
  • how do I configure and control deployment strategies (A/B, shadow, canary, feature flags, rollback)?
  • how do I customize infrastructure and build and release my own infrastructure and CI/CD modules

The infrastructure platform is truly the backbone of platform development and pays down most of the debt we need to make the subsequent platforms as modular as possible. The infrastructure platform covers everything from networking to core services, including optional gateway and authentication services, tools for logging, observability, monitoring and alerting. A custom local development tool brings it all together for the user at the command line with a few simple commands.