Today's applications heavily use cloud infrastructure, containers, and microservices. With this complexity, it's really important that a system provides observability to developers to better understand what's going on in the delivery pipeline. That is to say, meaningful insights into infrastructure and applications can help you understand the state of the system at any time. As well as prevent, identify and fix problems much easier and faster.

Moving in this direction, we're adding new features to improve Microtica. Today, we are enhancing our Infrastructure Builder feature by adding the Deployment Insights to the Microtica portal.

Infrastructure Builder

The Infrastructure Builder enables developers to build and automate the provisioning of the cloud infrastructure from GUI while still declaring and versioning their desired state (IaC) in Git. It consists of:

• Infrastructure Components
• Environments

A component is an isolated piece of infrastructure that allows developers to define and reuse infrastructure in a standardized way. For example, it could be a relational database, Kubernetes infrastructure with load balancers, cluster nodes, etc. A more specific example would be a combination of serverless resources (Lambda, SNS, SQS) that perform certain tasks, such as email processing.

An environment is a place where you build infrastructure blueprints by combining multiple components.

Deployment Insights

When having a small number of deployments (environments) and there is a dedicated person that manages the whole infrastructure setup, things are relatively easy to handle.

However, the challenge arises when you have a dozen environments composed of a variety of infrastructure components. In this case, it's crucial to have deep visibility into the infrastructure state at any point in time.

Microtica Deployments Insights answers several concerns about the cloud infrastructure state: the version of the component that is currently running in the cloud, the deployment status, the failure reason of the deployment, who changed what, etc.

Here are some additional information the Microtica Infrastructure Deployments Insights dashboard includes:

• the status of the deployment
• deployment version progression
• which Git branches were involved in the deployment
• who contributed on the deployment
• components that were affected by the deployment
• deployment status
• deployment version progression
• Git commit

An example of a running infrastructure deployment with each component being deployed is shown below.

For each environment, you have visibility of the entire deployment history, with detailed information on the state and history of every component involved. This allows you to not only have insights into your environment and its history but also to easily revert the whole infrastructure at any given time.