Product News

Port is open: let’s build Port together

September 13, 2023

Zohar Einy
Zohar Einy
Port is open: let’s build Port together
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Introduction

Today, as we announce our series A round, it’s also time to describe the vision behind what we’re doing at Port and our Port community. 

History: Ever since Port was only an idea, we’ve been incredibly lucky to be surrounded by a community that was as passionate about internal developer portals as we are. 

  • One early user insisted we need to be able to bring any data into the product and “model everything”.. This is how Port blueprints were born. We’re still discovering their power and usefulness. 
  • Other users wrote integrations, all on their own, and got us to think about anything from kubernetes native software catalogs to CI/CD data in the portal. 
  • Users started to bring AppSec and incident management data into the portal, and to spell out what that means for them, not to speak of the many use cases they had for developer self-service actions. Some of this has spurred us to create the Ocean extensibility framework (we’re announcing it today, too).
  • The constant dialogue with the community led us to open our product roadmap. We’re still amazed at the quality and thoughtfulness of each suggestion, as we are by the way people interact in our product community slack.

All of this led us to the inevitable conclusion: we aren’t building Port alone. We’re building it with the community and the more open the product and we are, the better. So this is our vision in three words: Port is Open.

If you read this as “port is open-source” this isn’t what we’re saying. Let me explain what we mean when we say Port is Open.

‍Platform engineering is a movement, and it’s still forming

When great changes happen in technology, they affect engineering culture and developer productivity. These changes are always greater than one product or company. This is how Kubernetes and Git projects came to life.

Port is at the center of the platform engineering movement. Portals are the core interface of the internal platforms that are there to drive developer productivity.  By working with the community, we can ensure Port moves together with platform engineering, preserving its momentum.

Internal developer portals need to fit engineering orgs and not vice versa

You know the background: the industry's understanding that the developer-devops interface is broken, that emerging technologies are overwhelmingly complex (think Kubernetes) and that devtool proliferation is hurting productivity. That’s why the industry is focusing on the developer experience and how to provide developer self-service, infrastructure automations and valuable abstractions. All this is delivered to developers in the internal developer portal.

We believe that Internal developer portals should be open by definition and include everything in the software development lifecycle, everything devops, AppSec, FinOps and more.  The more data is unified in context in the developer portal, the more value to developers. As a result, Port is open in all respects, from letting you control the UI for developer self-service actions, to control over pages and scorecards and more.

To allow data unification we announced Port Ocean today, which lets you easily extend Port to work with any devops tool or system, either in-house or commercially available and share your contribution with the community.  Port Ocean works well because of the inherent openness of Port using its Blueprints. Blueprints help people define the data model they want to use in Port, and, as a result, let you bring any metadata and self-service actions into the portal.

Breaking the Vendor/Customer model into a collaborative approach

Port has always had a generous free version - so that anyone can see what can be done with portals. We also took care to open our product roadmap, where the community has already shown us how to make Port better. We also have an open product community where everyone can collaborate and get support. We truly are working to be as transparent as we can as to the Port platform and where it is going. 

There’s a lot of building going on in Port, and in platform engineering. Come build with us!

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Example JSON block

{
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Order Domain

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}

Cart System

{
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  "identifier": "Cart",
  "title": "Cart"
}

Products System

{
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  "identifier": "Products",
  "title": "Products"
}

Cart Resource

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

Cart API

{
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 "title": "Cart API",
 "blueprint": "API",
 "properties": {
   "type": "Open API"
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 "relations": {
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 "icon": "Link"
}

Core Kafka Library

{
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}

Core Payment Library

{
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  "relations": {
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  "title": "Core Payment Library",
  "identifier": "CorePaymentLibrary"
}

Cart Service JSON

{
 "identifier": "CartService",
 "title": "Cart Service",
 "blueprint": "Component",
 "properties": {
   "type": "service"
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 "relations": {
   "system": "Cart",
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   "components": [
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 "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",
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 "icon": "Cloud",
 "schema": {
   "properties": {
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       "icon": "Docs",
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}

Resource Blueprint

{
 “identifier”: “Resource”,
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 “icon”: “DevopsTool”,
 “schema”: {
   “properties”: {
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       “icon”: “Docs”,
       “type”: “string”
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   “required”: []
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 “mirrorProperties”: {},
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API Blueprint

{
 "identifier": "API",
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 "icon": "Link",
 "schema": {
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 "relations": {
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Domain Blueprint

{
 "identifier": "Domain",
 "title": "Domain",
 "icon": "Server",
 "schema": {
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 "mirrorProperties": {},
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System Blueprint

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