The Kubernetes Current Blog

Rafay’s new Environment Manager Enables Developer Self-Service For Modern App Deployments – From Code To Cloud

Today, I am pleased to pre-announce the launch of Rafay Environment Manager, which will be generally available in the 2nd half of this year. Environment Manager is a new, cutting-edge service that provides platform teams with the management, governance, and automation capabilities needed to enable developer self-service for full-stack environment provisioning.

Speed of innovation is often compromised by the complexity platform teams experience from provisioning environments. In fact, research released today by Rafay shows that 1 in 4 organizations reportedly take three months or longer to deploy a modern application or service due to challenges with provisioning environments – and the majority of respondents in the study (61%) indicated that environment provisioning is a major roadblock to accelerating the timeframe for application deployments. Developers are hampered by the complexity of service dependencies when connecting modern Kubernetes applications to other cloud resources such as object storage, caches and databases. The time spent learning dependencies and low-level infrastructure components is a burden to engineering organizations whose goal is to move faster and deliver business outcomes.

Rafay Environment Manager removes the cumbersome ticketing process for environment provisioning we are (sadly) all familiar with. The solution automates the provisioning of full-stack environments and enables developers to self-service requests for said environments and cloud-native resources – all using the same core foundation of automation, multi-tenancy, and governance Rafay already provides for Kubernetes today.

How Environment Manager Works

First, using Infrastructure as Code such as Terraform and Rafay constructs, platform teams can define resources and the associated configurations and policies across the full cloud stack such as an AWS S3 Bucket, a Redis Cache, a shared EKS Cluster, etc. Then, platform teams can then stitch those resources together into full-stack templates that contain all the dependencies, policies, and configurations needed to define and deploy complex Kubernetes applications. Finally, developers can then use any interface they want such as GitHub Actions or Backstage to select from these templates and rapidly build and deploy applications to these environments with confidence that they are operating within a golden path and with the latest tools and updates, allowing them to focus on their core responsibilities and be more efficient.

Environment Management Features

Rafay Environment Manager will include the following capabilities upon it’s release:

 

  • Native Terraform Support – platform teams can define any resource such as an AWS S3 Bucket, Elastic Cache, Elastic Load Balancer, etc in Terraform or Terraform Cloud and combine those with existing Rafay constructs such as shared Kubernetes clusters needed for full-stack app deployments with the appropriate governance policies and dependencies defined to deploy complex apps while removing operational burdens and cost  All automation is done in Terraform including support for Terraform history of runs, and the ability to define high availability for Terraform agents.
  • Developer Self-Service – Developer teams can provision full-stack environments with a single click (or pull request) via environment templates that live in Git. Environment templates are defined, vetted and maintained by platform teams. Developers get to choose between Backstage, Terraform or Git to deploy environments without the need to configure separate pipelines.
  • Secure Multi-Tenancy and Access Controls – Want to use shared clusters? Or do you want to dedicate a cluster per team? Everything in Environment Manager is multi-tenant by default meaning you have flexibility between different operations. Enable developers to deploy complex apps on top of shared compute while having the necessary governance, security, and cost management capabilities needed to make this a reality. Appropriately assign Environment Admin roles to deploy or manage environments based on your organizational requirements. \
  • Easy dependency and variable configuration for flexibility and template reusability – Using any syntax you want, such as Terraform HCL or JSON, platform teams can configure the appropriate input variables or global environment variables needed to support different environment deployments while maintaining the same codebase for reusability
  • Multi-Interface Support including GitOps and UI – Whether you want to leverage GitOps to maintain environment templates or use the UI to make small changes, take advantage of Rafay’s two-way system sync so that changes are synchronized between Git and the Rafay console natively

Interested in learning more? Read more about Rafay Environment Manager on our website or contact us for a preview: https://rafay.co/contact/

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