#91: Don’t start your platform journey with Portals or GenAI

Hey there! Welcome to Platform Weekly, your weekly dance of the platform engineering salsa. This week we’ve got an awesome guest NL from Talia Moyal from Gitpod highlighting some awesome stuff from their new whitepaper on the power of cloud development environments .

For the sake of developer productivity, don’t start your platform journey with Portals or GenAI

Guest newsletter by Talia Moyal, Product at Gitpod

As a platform engineer, it’s never clear where to start your platform journey. But at the top of everyone’s list, there are three initiatives that keep coming back:?

• Developer Portals
• Generative AI (GenAI)??
• Standardized and automated development environments

I’m going to talk through these initiatives, some of the ways in which they fall short, and where I recommend starting to maximize your ability to improve developer productivity as a platform engineer.?

Portals connect all tools, documentation, and team information in one central catalog. They are especially helpful for large teams with complex infrastructure, but can be equally beneficial for smaller teams who are looking for a unified interface where developers can access resources. Where do Portals fall short??

• Adoption challenges: Portals are a broad tool that solve many different sub-problems. As with any platform initiative, without a strong enough pain to address or organizational priority, adoption will stall. Additionally, introducing new interfaces to developers can take significant time to enact behavioral change.?
• Limited scope: Portals commonly focus on the discovery of resources, which usually appeals more to leadership than developers. This focus is also more relevant to the scaffolding and launching of new services, at the start of the development lifecycle, leaving day 2 concerns like updates, patching, and maintenance to still be considered

We can all agree that GenAI is revolutionizing how developers write, document, and test code. By leveraging LLMs, these tools generate code snippets, suggest improvements, and even identify potential bugs. GenAI shines when it comes to automating repetitive tasks and providing intelligent insights during development.?

Where does genAI fall short??

• Measuring return on investment: Understanding if GenAI is worth the resources is challenging. Organizations are asking unanswered questions around ‘who is getting value?’, ‘how much value?’, ‘how much faster are we going?’.

• Accuracy and reliability: GenAI can generate code that is syntactically correct but logically flawed, or doesn’t fully meet specific requirements of a task. It doesn’t ‘understand’ code in the way humans do, rather it generates code based on patterns, which can lead to misapplication of concepts or inappropriate suggestions.?
• Limited scope: Similarly to portals, GenAI only supports a short part of the development lifecycle. While it can improve productivity related to writing boilerplate code, it relies on developers to be able to set up their environment and integrate these tools appropriately.?

Cloud development environments are standardized and automated development environments pre-configured with all tools, dependencies and packages required to write code. For developers, CDEs provide the freedom to use all of their favorite tooling without the overhead of setting up a development environment. For platform teams, CDEs provide a centralized place to standardize and automate everything related to the setup, maintenance, access provisioning and troubleshooting of development environments. As a result, this enables platform teams to shift their influence to the inner loop of the software development life cycle, unblocking the core of developer productivity issues.?

CDEs should be implemented as a foundation to, or in combination with, Portals and GenAI, making them a perfect first initiative.?

Organizational benefits of CDEs:?

• Enabling developers to self-serve
• Improving developer productivity
• Improving developer experience
• Improving security posture
• Supporting remote and hybrid work?

Download this white paper to learn more about the ROI of standardized and automated development environments specific to platform teams.?