How it works
A platform built with Humanitec’s products adds three additional components to your existing CI/CD setup. Score, a workload specification which sits next to your workload source code in your repository. You use it to describe workloads and their dependent resources in an environment agnostic way. The Platform Orchestrator, which sits post-CI and generates application and infrastructure configurations and deploys them. It does this based on the input from developers and platform engineers. Drivers that implement the Orchestrator API to update and or create infrastructure resources.
These three products interplay as follows:
Describe workload
Developers describe what their workloads need in an abstract way. They do this using a workload specification such as Score, the Deployment Set and Delta functionality in the Orchestrator (either by API or UI).
This description needs to happen ones (at the creation time of the workload) but can be altered to add or remove dependencies from the workload. There is much more functionality to make delivery easy for application developers. This will be covered in more detail in this section.
Deploy abstraction
With every deployment, the Platform Orchestrator generates applications and, as necessary, infrastructure configurations and deploys them.
It does this by applying the abstract request from developers to the baseline configurations provided by the platform engineering team.
To understand in detail how the final application and infrastructure configurations are created, the Build a platform section provides more detail.
Drivers create or update
Drivers are used to create or update infrastructure resources.
The easiest way to understand what happens with every deployment, is to follow a deployment from git-push to running. Read more about this in the section Build a platform.
Features
As a developer, there are three feature categories you interact with Humanitec’s products:
| Feature category | Products used | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Configure | Score, Platform Orchestrator | Used when first spinning up workloads from templates and or a service catalog. Used continuously when dependent resources, environment variables, annotations etc. are added or changed. |
| Deploy | Platform Orchestrator | With every git-push, the Platform Orchestrator will build and create app- and, if applicable, infrastructure-configurations and deploys them. While the user interacts, it’s only indirect. The workflow is, if deployment automations are configured, automated in response to every git-push. |
| Operate | Platform Orchestrator | When operating cloud-native applications, the Platform Orchestrator provides an array of different functionalities:
|
Interfaces
Platforms built with Humanitec can expose a number of interfaces to their users. By default, you can choose an interface on a “workload by workload” basis. Meaning different workloads of an application can be configured through different interfaces. There are four different interfaces to choose from:
| Product | Type | Commonly used features |
|---|---|---|
| Score | code-based | Configure workload and dependent resources in an environment agnostic way. Add or remove resources. |
| Platform Orchestrator | Web UI | Configure workloads and resources, deploy, roll-back, diff debug, logs, view what’s running where, spin up new environments, promote between environments automation, webhooks, resource management. |
| Platform Orchestrator (coming soon) | CLI | Deploy, roll-back, diff, debug, inspect, promote between environments, spin up new environments. |
| Platform Orchestrator | API | Automate, deploy, diff, roll-back, spin up new environment. |