category
Konfigurate
- #112 6 min
Platform Engineering as a Service
Like most industry jargon, “DevOps” means a lot of things to a lot of different people. While many folks view it as specific to certain tooling or practices, such as CI/CD or Infrastructure as Code (IaC), I’ve always viewed it as an organizational model for how software is built and delivered. In particular, my interpretation is that DevOps is about shifting more responsibilities “left” onto developers, moving away from the more traditional “throw it over the wall” approach to IT operations. No doubt this encompasses tooling or practices like CI/CD and IaC, which are responsibilities that developers now shoulder, perhaps with the support of dev tools, productivity, or enablement teams—some companies just call this the “DevOps” team.
- #111 9 min
Deployment-Driven Development
Most people use “DDD” to refer to Domain-Driven Design, which is a useful tool for thinking about API boundaries and system architecture. It provides a way to map a business problem into software. At Real Kinetic, we regularly help our clients utilize Domain-Driven Design as well as other strategies to architect their systems, avoid some of the pitfalls of DDD, and build an effective foundation for designing software. But this DDD only speaks to one small aspect of building and shipping software.
- #110 20 min
Automating Infrastructure as Code with Vertex AI
A lot of companies are trying to figure out how AI can be used to improve their business. Most of them are struggling to not just implement AI, but to even find use cases that aren’t contrived and actually add value to their customers. We recently discovered a compelling use case for AI integration in our Konfigurate platform, and we found that implementing generative AI doesn’t require a great deal of complexity. I’m going to walk you through what we learned about integrating an AI assistant into our production system. There’s a ton of noise out there about what you “need” to integrate AI into your product. The good news? You don’t need much. The bad news? It took too much time sifting through nonsense to find what actually helps deliver value with AI.
- #109 20 min
Understanding Konfig’s Opinionation
In my last post, I talked about the benefits of an opinionated platform. An opinionated platform allows your engineers to focus on things that matter to your business, such as shipping and improving customer-facing products and services. This is in contrast to engineers spending substantial time on non-differentiating work like platform infrastructure. Rather than infrastructure architecture, developers can focus more on the product architecture. Konfig is an opinionated platform which provides two key value drivers: 1) reducing the investment and total cost of ownership needed to have an enterprise cloud platform and 2) minimizing the time to deliver new software products.
- #108 7 min
No assembly required: the benefits of an opinionated platform
When you talk to a doctor about a medical issue they will often present you with all of the options but shy away from providing an unambiguous recommendation. When you talk to a lawyer about a legal matter they frequently do the same. While it’s important to understand your options and their trade-offs or associated risks, when you go to these specialists you are likely seeking the counsel of an experienced and knowledgeable expert in their field who can help you make an informed decision. What most people are probably looking for is the answer to “what would you, someone who knows a lot about this stuff, do if you were in this situation?” After all, many of us are probably capable of finding the options ourselves, but the difficult part is determining what the right course of action is for a particular situation.