Platform Engineering

Port adds cloud cost management to its no-code internal developer portal to enable simple FinOps for platform engineering

April 18, 2023

Zohar Einy
Zohar Einy
Port adds cloud cost management to its no-code internal developer portal to enable simple FinOps for platform engineering
Example H2

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Introduction

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Port announced today that its no-code internal developer portal now brings FinOps insights into the portal, allowing FinOps, DevOps and platform engineering teams to stay on top of cloud costs, rightsize spend and drive a more cost-conscious engineering culture without spending hours to get the basic reporting in place.

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Today, most cloud resource cost reporting tools report data about cloud resources, such as S3, EC2 etc or kubernetes objects such as deployment, service, namespace, clusters and more. “The problem is that this type of reporting makes sense from the cloud resource provider point of view but is almost meaningless from the point of view of developers, teams and business owners, since it doesn’t tie into the microservice or system each of them are responsible for” said Yonatan Boguslavsky. Typically, to understand costs in a way that makes sense for developers and business teams, an extensive tagging effort is required within the cloud resource cost tracking tools. While this is feasible theoretically, it requires discipline and labor and is usually not done as it should be. “Internal developer portals and their broad software catalog can solve this problem” said Boguslavsky.

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Internal developer portals lie at the center of the platform engineering revolution and support more than just developer self-service and abstraction. At their core lies a broad software catalog which contains a real time view of all software and infrastructure, including cloud resources. As such, the software catalog can show microservices, cloud resources and dependencies relating to teams, developers, services, systems and domains. Using integrations it takes minutes to add cloud cost data to Port’s software catalog, and all the data will be immediately mapped to developers, teams, microservices, systems and domains. Doing this in Port’s internal developer portal platform makes it easy to query the data and create reports on cloud cost per team, developer, service, system and domain.

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“Software catalogs contain everything about costs, services, cloud resources, CI/CD and more. As such, they contain a real time snapshot of everything in the engineering environment, and are easily searchable” says Zohar Einy, CEO of Port. “Internal developer portals are about unifying information and reducing cognitive load. Developers track bugs or user counts on one central screen, sometimes even a large screen in a central place in the workplace. Why shouldn’t cost data be presented in a similar way?”, said Einy.

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“This can be taken even further” said Einy. “You can create scorecards for cost to create a cost-conscious engineering culture and to rightsize costs without adding cognitive load to developers. You can also use workflow automation to identify issues and send alerts to the right people” Another option, adds Einy, is to get developers to add descriptions to services that capture their expected resource usage and cost. 

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About Port

Port is a platform for building no-code, holistic, Internal Developer Portals. Port’s software catalog covers microservices, resources, custom assets and fits any data model, with in-context maturity scorecards. Its portals support any developer self-service action and workflow automation. You can read more at getport.io or see a live demo at demo.getport.io

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Example JSON block

{
  "foo": "bar"
}

Order Domain

{
  "properties": {},
  "relations": {},
  "title": "Orders",
  "identifier": "Orders"
}

Cart System

{
  "properties": {},
  "relations": {
    "domain": "Orders"
  },
  "identifier": "Cart",
  "title": "Cart"
}

Products System

{
  "properties": {},
  "relations": {
    "domain": "Orders"
  },
  "identifier": "Products",
  "title": "Products"
}

Cart Resource

{
  "properties": {
    "type": "postgress"
  },
  "relations": {},
  "icon": "GPU",
  "title": "Cart SQL database",
  "identifier": "cart-sql-sb"
}

Cart API

{
 "identifier": "CartAPI",
 "title": "Cart API",
 "blueprint": "API",
 "properties": {
   "type": "Open API"
 },
 "relations": {
   "provider": "CartService"
 },
 "icon": "Link"
}

Core Kafka Library

{
  "properties": {
    "type": "library"
  },
  "relations": {
    "system": "Cart"
  },
  "title": "Core Kafka Library",
  "identifier": "CoreKafkaLibrary"
}

Core Payment Library

{
  "properties": {
    "type": "library"
  },
  "relations": {
    "system": "Cart"
  },
  "title": "Core Payment Library",
  "identifier": "CorePaymentLibrary"
}

Cart Service JSON

{
 "identifier": "CartService",
 "title": "Cart Service",
 "blueprint": "Component",
 "properties": {
   "type": "service"
 },
 "relations": {
   "system": "Cart",
   "resources": [
     "cart-sql-sb"
   ],
   "consumesApi": [],
   "components": [
     "CorePaymentLibrary",
     "CoreKafkaLibrary"
   ]
 },
 "icon": "Cloud"
}

Products Service JSON

{
  "identifier": "ProductsService",
  "title": "Products Service",
  "blueprint": "Component",
  "properties": {
    "type": "service"
  },
  "relations": {
    "system": "Products",
    "consumesApi": [
      "CartAPI"
    ],
    "components": []
  }
}

Component Blueprint

{
 "identifier": "Component",
 "title": "Component",
 "icon": "Cloud",
 "schema": {
   "properties": {
     "type": {
       "enum": [
         "service",
         "library"
       ],
       "icon": "Docs",
       "type": "string",
       "enumColors": {
         "service": "blue",
         "library": "green"
       }
     }
   },
   "required": []
 },
 "mirrorProperties": {},
 "formulaProperties": {},
 "calculationProperties": {},
 "relations": {
   "system": {
     "target": "System",
     "required": false,
     "many": false
   },
   "resources": {
     "target": "Resource",
     "required": false,
     "many": true
   },
   "consumesApi": {
     "target": "API",
     "required": false,
     "many": true
   },
   "components": {
     "target": "Component",
     "required": false,
     "many": true
   },
   "providesApi": {
     "target": "API",
     "required": false,
     "many": false
   }
 }
}

Resource Blueprint

{
 “identifier”: “Resource”,
 “title”: “Resource”,
 “icon”: “DevopsTool”,
 “schema”: {
   “properties”: {
     “type”: {
       “enum”: [
         “postgress”,
         “kafka-topic”,
         “rabbit-queue”,
         “s3-bucket”
       ],
       “icon”: “Docs”,
       “type”: “string”
     }
   },
   “required”: []
 },
 “mirrorProperties”: {},
 “formulaProperties”: {},
 “calculationProperties”: {},
 “relations”: {}
}

API Blueprint

{
 "identifier": "API",
 "title": "API",
 "icon": "Link",
 "schema": {
   "properties": {
     "type": {
       "type": "string",
       "enum": [
         "Open API",
         "grpc"
       ]
     }
   },
   "required": []
 },
 "mirrorProperties": {},
 "formulaProperties": {},
 "calculationProperties": {},
 "relations": {
   "provider": {
     "target": "Component",
     "required": true,
     "many": false
   }
 }
}

Domain Blueprint

{
 "identifier": "Domain",
 "title": "Domain",
 "icon": "Server",
 "schema": {
   "properties": {},
   "required": []
 },
 "mirrorProperties": {},
 "formulaProperties": {},
 "calculationProperties": {},
 "relations": {}
}

System Blueprint

{
 "identifier": "System",
 "title": "System",
 "icon": "DevopsTool",
 "schema": {
   "properties": {},
   "required": []
 },
 "mirrorProperties": {},
 "formulaProperties": {},
 "calculationProperties": {},
 "relations": {
   "domain": {
     "target": "Domain",
     "required": true,
     "many": false
   }
 }
}
{{tabel-1}}

Microservices SDLC

  • Scaffold a new microservice

  • Deploy (canary or blue-green)

  • Feature flagging

  • Revert

  • Lock deployments

  • Add Secret

  • Force merge pull request (skip tests on crises)

  • Add environment variable to service

  • Add IaC to the service

  • Upgrade package version

Development environments

  • Spin up a developer environment for 5 days

  • ETL mock data to environment

  • Invite developer to the environment

  • Extend TTL by 3 days

Cloud resources

  • Provision a cloud resource

  • Modify a cloud resource

  • Get permissions to access cloud resource

SRE actions

  • Update pod count

  • Update auto-scaling group

  • Execute incident response runbook automation

Data Engineering

  • Add / Remove / Update Column to table

  • Run Airflow DAG

  • Duplicate table

Backoffice

  • Change customer configuration

  • Update customer software version

  • Upgrade - Downgrade plan tier

  • Create - Delete customer

Machine learning actions

  • Train model

  • Pre-process dataset

  • Deploy

  • A/B testing traffic route

  • Revert

  • Spin up remote Jupyter notebook

{{tabel-2}}

Engineering tools

  • Observability

  • Tasks management

  • CI/CD

  • On-Call management

  • Troubleshooting tools

  • DevSecOps

  • Runbooks

Infrastructure

  • Cloud Resources

  • K8S

  • Containers & Serverless

  • IaC

  • Databases

  • Environments

  • Regions

Software and more

  • Microservices

  • Docker Images

  • Docs

  • APIs

  • 3rd parties

  • Runbooks

  • Cron jobs

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