richly supported…design patterns

There exists an opportunity to bring several graphics into a concurrency that enables the support of richly supported processes.  Richly supported here means those processes supported by the confluence of several Cloud Native Computing Foundation Landscape solutions.  What people seem to be in need of is not policies, processes, or products.  We have the concept of an Internal Developer Platform policy, Golden Path processes, and the entire CNCF Landscape as a product catalog for inspiration. 

What we need is a way to interweave the policies, processes, and products into design patterns.  One’s very bad in that this wasn’t realized much sooner.  Here, we attempt to make up for the deficiency in understanding that the wake all of the great work being done wasn’t yet a wave.  It will be soon, regardless of what gets done here because it has to.  Literally, it just has to or many opportunities for leveraging emerging technologies, in whole or in part or in concert, will be but opportunity lost.  The opportunity cost of loss is a form of technical debt that accumulates in proportion with interest rate changes.

From the perspective of policy, we mentioned the Internal Developer Platform.  Below is a representation of an IDP as developed by Humanitec. 

Platform reference architecture on GCP (humanitec.com); accessed 10 may 2023; rights reserved to publisher

The Humanitec IDP consists of five planes defined as:

·  The Developer Control Plane

·  The Integration & Delivery Plane

·  The Resource Plane 

·  The Observability Plane 

·  The Security Plane 

Since one way to organize the morphogenesis of a multi-Plane architecture is to use a maturity model framework, we can use the Smart Grid Maturity Model to provide us templates for each Plane.  In the Smart Grid Maturity Model, the sub-sections are called Domains, but the relationship of Domains to that Maturity Model is the same as that of the Humanitec Planes to the IDP. 

A mapping of the Smart Grid Maturity Model Domains to the five Humanitec Planes might be as follows:

Note: Humanitec Plane list from - Platform reference architecture on GCP (humanitec.com); accessed 10 may 2023, SGMM Domain representations from: SGMM Overview, published by the Software Engineering Institute of Carnegie Mellon in 2021.  Rights reserved to those organizations.

This alignment provides us a way to orchestrate the lifecycle of an IDP over the course of its viability as a service to developer organizations. The next step is to identify a process by which the solutions necessary to support the evolution of a maturity level can be adopted sequentially, efficiently, and with extensibility.

A process that can support the development of an IDP has already been developed.  The Open Group IT4IT process has been used in multiple areas to provide a scalable, efficient, and flexible model for process development.   The complete proces is depicted below.

The Open Group IT4IT Reference Architecture; rights reserved; accessed 18 may 2023

What remains is to link the IDP and its five Planes through the maturity model to the IT4IT process.  With this concatenation of services and insights, we can use the CNCF Landscape to provide the components necessary to deliver a developer platform service-as-a-Service catalog.