Product
Increasing Engineering Efficiency with Prodvana
Andrew Fong
Efficiency is the name of the game
Efficiency is top of mind for everyone in 2023 and will continue to be relevant for the foreseeable future. This post explores how Prodvana can fit into your overall efficiency strategies.
Generally, the two most significant areas of spend in technical organizations are:
Headcount
Cloud Costs (including SaaS)
Prodvana helps increase your efficiency in both areas by:
Turning your manual processes into automated gates.
Creating consistent workflows between teams.
Decreasing the infrastructure change tax.
Manual Processes into Automated Gates
Launch checklists, Production Readiness Reviews, and Release Plans are examples of artifacts that can be codified within Prodvana to simplify and reduce the overhead of coordinating releases.
When you use Prodvana, you map environmental constraints to environments. This allows engineers to understand the release conditions, ensures that the “checklist” is consistently applied, and verifies robust control of the constraints.
Let’s look at an example: Suppose you require canary analysis in your production environments.
Using Prodvana, you only have to specify this requirement once at the environment level, ensuring that 100% of your deployments in production will use a consistent process for validating that the release is working.
Other important factors, like having sign-offs done before a deployment goes live and validating that alerts are not firing, are just a couple of additional use cases that can all be managed in one place.
In our own experience setting up a service for the first time, an engineer can deploy within minutes on Prodvana, contrasting the back-and-forth flow that most organizations have.
Consistent Workflows Between Teams
When working with dynamically changing priorities, a single workflow for your entire engineering organization is a massive win.
When top-level priorities change staffing changes and services change ownership. These changes come at an organizational and monetary cost. They are highly unsettling for groups that must (re)learn how inherited systems are managed.
With Prodvana’s Dynamic Delivery Engine, developers can ramp quickly because the UX is simple and consistent for them to use and already has the predefined constraints baked in.
Decreasing The Infrastructure Change Tax
Infrastructural changes can be incredibly invasive to roadmaps and require large amounts of coordination across your organization. This is seen universally in engineering as a “tax.” As we all know, if you reduce your taxes, you take home more!
For example: If you wish to mature your organization by enabling progressive deployments, the flow typically would entail asking teams to allow this or approve a pull request —ideally in a mono repo that has everything in a standardized place. This problem is compounded by having many repositories per service or team.
More sophisticated use cases would include migrations between clouds or regions where you must deploy the application for cost reasons, to increase your footprint, or because a resource is moving. In the example below, we are moving our application from using ECS to using Kubernetes - this will ensure all services we have deployed are redeployed using the same guardrails in Kubernetes that we have for ECS.
With Prodvana, the taxes on infrastructure migrations are significantly reduced. Do more with the same or less.
We Believe In Zero Overhead
Zero overhead is the fundamental belief at Prodvana. When you use Prodvana, you are working with a team that aims to increase the efficiency of your organization in both the short and long term.
The examples above have compounding effects on your organization. This allows more engineers to engage in deployments and gives you flexibility in staffing and headcount allocation.
Schedule a demo today to see how Prodvana can partner with you to drive efficiency and productivity in your 2023 business and engineer strategies and beyond!
