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About this book

Welcome! Thank you for taking interest in building developer platforms.

You made the right call. This book is going to make your job of building a developer platform much easier.

For the past couple of years, every SaaS company I know have been piecing together their own developer platform.

Not by coincidence.

Devops skills are in high demand​

Most companies in Europe are hiring DevOps engineers as we speak while also requiring developers to know how to develop cloud native applications. The hiring market is hot.

When I asked a recruiter friend at one of the hottest recruiting agencies in the Central European region to rate the demand for devops engineers between 1 and 10, he rated it 10. He also noted: "For the past two years, we have been running 8-10 devops hiring processes and constantly have to turn down new clients either because of the the lack of devops engineers or we see that the given company with its culture has no desirability for devops engineers."

Devops requires a lot from developers​

[Laci to rework] Shifting operational, security and testing concerns left (explain 'shift left' first) is the right thing to do, but it is a tall order to be conscious of all concerns of software delivery. Tooling needs to be in place to help developers in this transformation.

65% of the mid and high performers have teams responsible for maintaining a self-service developer platform​

The Puppet State of DevOps Report 2021 indicates that many organizations are at a halt with their devops efforts, skilled labor shortage being one of the major contributing factors.

It also states that 65% of their mid and high performers have teams responsible for maintaining internal self-service platforms. [end rework]

This book is going to make your job of building a developer platform much easier​

We start out by defining what a developer platform is, how it comes into existence, when to start building one, and what characteristics are important.

Then we split the platform building effort into two parts:

  • deployment workflows and automation
  • platform features

About half of the book’s contents are applicable in a generic manner, using off-the-shelf cloud native tools that you can assemble yourself.

The other half requires Gimlet to install and configure off-the-shelf cloud native tools and to cover the deployment automation workflows. I intend to mark every chapter that requires Gimlet, this way, the book can be useful even for those who don’t share our passion for Gimlet.

Besides Gimlet, I vouch for the following cloud native tools in this book:

  • Ingress Nginx
  • Cert-Manager
  • Prometheus
  • Grafana
  • Loki
  • Tempo
  • Sealed Secrets
  • External Secrets
  • Kyverno
  • Linkerd
  • OAuth2 Proxy
  • Velero

The book also embraces the gitops approach for deployment automation.

What will you be able to build by reading this book?​

First and foremost, a developer platform on top of Kubernetes.

  • Deployment workflows, automation, and tooling
  • Observability tools
  • Gitops automation
  • Best practices to common day-2 operations tasks
  • Update path for platform components

Who is the book’s target audience?​

Anyone who works for a company that has 3-25 engineers with no dedicated Kubernetes expert. This book will speed up your efforts with its abstractions and pragmatic approach.

It caters equally to devops-minded developers and engineers coming from ops background.

You will find this book helpful, if you are…

  • a developer who wants to deploy to Kubernetes and needs some guidance
  • a devops-minded developer who runs a Kubernetes pilot project with the aim of sharing your experiences with your team
  • an automation-focused devops professional
  • a platform team member who prefers a head start

Prerequisites​

  • Bring your own cluster. The practices and tools I present in this book work with any Kubernetes distribution.
    • I recommend using k3d, if you don't have a cluster.
  • Bring your container images. The deployment workflows do not cover container image building. You have to have an image to deploy.
  • Kubernetes knowledge

About the author​

Laszlo Fogas - the author

Hi, I’m Laszlo Fogas, the creator of Gimlet.io.

After four years of being an independent consultant building developer platforms for Nordic SaaS companies, I decided to put everything I have learned into a tool. Thus, Gimlet was born.

Now, I lead a small company, which provides consulting services related to Gimlet, where we try to make Gimlet better every single day.

Prior to being a consultant, I was part of a Danish growth story, Falcon.io, as their first backend hire. I was part of the company’s growth for 5 years and contributed heavily to their exit, resulting in an undisclosed 9 digit selling price.

The infrastructure and developer processes I built and operated for various companies over the years earned USD 45 million in venture funding for those companies.

Acknowledgments​

Many thanks to…