Start Playing With Humanitec
I recently joined Humanitec as Senior Cloud QA Engineer. However this post is less about my job, than about the tech stack Humanitec has to offer for people like me: I am an engineer that is good in creating services, but prefers (= requires) an ops team to manage the infrastructure. In a series of infrequent blog posts, I will investigate how to make use of Humanitec when you are a single self-driven engineer.
Humanitec is a platform orchestrator. It aims for corporations and companies that struggle scaling cloud-ops team along with developer teams. Most of the time, it starts with developers knowing _what_ cloud components they need, but not _how_ to set them up. Thus, a cloud-ops team is established providing and maintaining the components. Commonly, developers would request cloud resources from ops team through an established process: ticketing. Why a ticketing system? Because it is already there for processing customer requests.
Unfortunately, ticket systems do not scale very well with demand. A change request of a customer (=1 ticket) can result in dozens of tickets from developers requesting infrastructure changes. Rather sooner than later, developers become frustrated, because they “just want a artifact registry/database/file storage” and their ticket is always the one that never gets prioritized by cloud-ops team. Cloud-Ops team gets frustrated because there are just so many tickets on the one side and that many components to maintain on the other side.
Around that misery evolved a discipline called platform engineering, basically creating a self-service platform for developers fueled with resources managed by cloud-ops team. Humanitec provides the orchestrator for such an internal developer platform.
Now, I am _not_ a company, but I am a developer that could use a cloud-ops team. Since I do not have a private cloud-ops team, I will try to use Humanitec at low scale: on small, open source driven, process automation projects.
For a start, we need to go to https://humanitec.com/ and create an account. For projects with up to 5 user, Humanitec is free of charge. Which is great, because I am only 1 user. 1 user, with tight budget, hardly any resources and limited free time for dealing with pitfalls managing k8s.
After having created your account, go to https://developer.humanitec.com/ follow the tutorial for setting up an example application. By default, your sample application will be deployed on a kubernetes cluster managed by Humanitec that you do not have any direct access to. This is what using an internal developer platform at a company would feel like: the cloud-ops team maintains the cluster, and configures resources at the platform orchestrator, the developer selects and deploys resources without exactly knowing how and where they are provisioned. Which is good, because I am more a developer and usually don’t want to care about infrastructure too much.
In the future blog posts, will cover how to connect your own k8s cluster, hook in your own docker registry as source for deployed services and how to deploy your own services adding up to your own application.
