Blueprints Evolution

Blueprints are a very convenient way to provide a set of opinionated tools to the application teams, but with the added cost of the application teams now becoming the operators of their own platform. Application teams want to continue to have the ability to quickly gain access to the services they need without this overhead. They don’t want to operate their own platform and they don’t want to become experts at understanding and forking the blueprints.

The first step in moving away from this approach is to shift the responsibility of operating the blueprints to those who wrote the blueprints: the platform team. This migration must be a gradual change, taking services one by one and prioritising the services that are most used or operationally expensive. By transitioning ownership to the platform team, this frees up application teams to focus on delivering direct business value. 

Taking responsibility for operating the services isn’t enough. Application teams have gotten used to the on-demand aspect of these services. Transitioning to a manual request through, for example, a ticket workflow raises new challenges. The platform team needs to ensure they continue to allow self-service of these workflows by creating an API and automating the creation of these resources behind the scenes. Automation allows the platform team to enforce any governance and compliance requirements for the organisation. While the initial cost of migrating that first service might be high, the rewards for the application and platform teams are even higher.

Transitioning from a manual process of running blueprints or scripts to a full user-facing API with automation can be challenging, but Kratix is designed to make it easy. Kratix is a framework for building platforms and is built upon a concept called Promises. Promises are the encapsulation of a service you want to provide. You define how you want your application teams to consume Promises (API), and what should happen when they are consumed, via the execution of pipelines. Kratix makes the transition from blueprints workflow to a high-level, opinionated API easy.