What is configure8?
configure8 is a developer experience platform that helps technology teams navigate their distributed cloud architecture and manage sprawl.
Here are some key benefits configure8 can bring to you and your organization
- Organize your operations - Empower your engineers to find an individual application, service, or cloud resource. See key information organized in one place. Drill into details. Deep link into underlying tools.
- Cross-cloud Resources - Avoid logging into multiple accounts across clouds and tools by organizing all your cross-cloud resources in one place.
- Metrics - See reliability, performance, cost, security, and CI/CD metrics in one place. Deep link into underlying tools if needed.
- Incident Response - Easily create incidents, communicate with owners, and find all the information you need about a service, resource or application.
- Dependencies - Visualize and filter dependencies for applications, services and serverless functions.
- Ownership & Documentation - Easily find owners and on-call rotations as well as documentation and runbooks.
Here are a couple of real-world problems configure8 can help you with. Any of them sound familiar?
- It is announced that a particular language version will no longer be supported and you have to upgrade. Which services and applications across your entire infrastructure will need to be fixed before the deprecation date?
- You use a common open-source library and it was just announced it has a security vulnerability. How many of your services are dependent on that library?
- You finally took a vacation and one of your services has an issue. Your manager calls and wants to know what else this affects and who is on-call handling it?
- Your finance department calls and wants to know why your cloud provider bill has gone up 124% last month. Wouldn't it be nice to tell them how many services and applications got added to support company growth?
These are just a few examples we lived through as developers and wanted to help solve for others.
This section goes over a couple of key concepts that should help you in your configure8 travels. We think they are intuitive but never hurts to make sure we are all on the same page.
Credentials - Credentials are unique pieces of information that allows configure8 to connect to a service or application on your behalf. configure8 stores encrypted credentials so that it can automate tasks that require this information to run properly. Credentials contain the necessary information (tokens, etc.) for configure8 to use in interacting with an external service. Credentials live at the organization level, and an organization may have many credentials for a single provider.
Resources - Resources are items that can range from infrastructure (ie database, server, VPC, etc.) to external services (ie source repository, CI/CD infrastructure, on-call system, monitoring system, documentation, etc.). Resources are associated with 1 or more services.
Resources are gathered by either the Discovery Engine (e.g. public cloud provider resources), or gathered by the REST API Proxy - no need for you to enter them
Services - Services are a named group of resources, environments, repository, and people. It can be dependent (upstream or downstream) on other services. As an example, there may be a “Credit card processing” service that is dependent on a “logging service”.
Applications - Applications are a group of services that perform a well-defined task. They map to what you and I would think of as a full “application”.
Environments - Some resources (like servers, databases, etc.) will belong to a specific environment (production, QA, dev, etc.). Services can have 1 or more environments with resources, but other resources (like CI/CD, etc.) live directly on the service level, not the environment level.
Plugins - Plugins are service level UI elements powered by data provided via the plugin library to give you deeper insight into your service. They rely on a combination of plugin settings and credentials.
People - People who are associated with a service (i.e. manually assigned as owners or are in the on-call rotation). Also known as humans.
Enough of the small-talk. Let's get started. There are 3 main things you should do to get you up and running quickly. Assuming you have the appropriate credentials, this shouldn't take you more than 10 minutes.
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Last modified 7mo ago