Massdriver Adds Cloud Cost Controls to Internal Developer Platform
By: Mike Vizard on December 18, 2023 Rdp Thin Client
Massdriver has made available tools for tracking cloud costs and generating a cloud infrastructure bill of materials (Cloud IBOM) to internal developer platforms (IDPs) as part of an ongoing effort to streamline platform engineering workflows.
The Cloud IBOM makes it possible, with a few clicks, to map hybrid cloud resources such as databases, machine learning pipelines and serverless computing frameworks.
Massdriver CEO Corey O’Daniel said collectively, these tools reduce expenses by preventing misconfigurations that result in unexpected costs. Rather than solely providing a summary of costs incurred, the tools provided by Massdriver surface how much cloud services are going to cost at the time the developer is invoking them, he noted.
In the absence of that context, developers will nearly always overprovision cloud resources to ensure maximum availability regardless of cost, says O’Daniel. The overall goal is to help organizations reduce the total cost of IT by providing developers with insights into costs in real-time, he added.
Earlier this year, the company launched an IDP that comes with platform engineering tools that, for example, make it possible for DevOps teams to build a catalog of infrastructure components that developers can access within the context of guardrails they define. The platform also includes observability and visualization tools that make it simpler to track metrics and monitor the usage of cloud resources.
Massdriver is making a case for an IDP that provides built-in tools and workflows that enable organizations to embrace platform engineering as a methodology for managing DevOps workflows at scale. The goal is to reduce the level of expertise required to build and deploy applications in cloud computing environments, said O’Daniel. One of the primary reasons there are not more applications running in the cloud today is that these environments are still too complex to successfully manage, he added. An IDP abstracts away that complexity within a set of workflows that have been vetted by a DevOps team, he added.
There are, of course, multiple approaches to building an IDP, but rival approaches require too much effort to set up and maintain, said O’Daniel. A proprietary platform provides a more turnkey approach that doesn’t require DevOps teams to either build their own or customize an open source platform, he added.
It’s not clear at what pace organizations are embracing platform engineering, but there is a clear need to strike a balance between delivering IT services managed by a centralized team and the desire a developer might have to embrace new tooling whenever they see fit. Today, too much responsibility for provisioning IT environments has been pushed left toward developers who now have less time than ever to write code.
There is, naturally, no guarantee that reducing the cognitive load for developers will increase productivity. Building applications requires streaks of inspiration, but, in theory, an IDP should provide more time for inspiration to strike. DevOps teams, as part of that effort, should be continuously working toward eliminating any bottlenecks that have emerged in their DevOps workflows.
Filed Under: Blogs, Business of DevOps, Cloud Management, DevOps in the Cloud, Features, Infrastructure/Networking, News, Platform Engineering, Social - X Tagged With: bill of materials, cloud costs, cloud infrastructure, IBOM, IDPs, internal developer platform, Massdriver
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