What is Humanitec?

Profile

Humanitec gives engineering teams the ability to build a customized dynamic Internal Developer Platform (IDP) that enables Dynamic Configuration Management. With its open-source drivers and ability to integrate with any Infrastructure as Code (IaC) setup, Humanitec offers the most complete ecosystem of integrations, compared to other platform solutions. Developers can choose their preferred tools as they construct an end-to-end self-service flow.

Humanitec is most widely recognized for its flexibility, customizability, zero lock-in and extensibility. The product enables engineering teams to overcome ticket ops by creating golden paths for developer self-service. In turn, developers can spin up fully provisioned environments on demand and deploy apps independently via Humanitec’s API, UI, or CLI. Humanitec works to decrease lead time and increase deployment frequency.

As Humanitec is frequently shipping new features, the documentation seems to be falling behind. Ideally, the docs would be updated in tandem with the product's new capabilities.

Focus

The main focus of Humanitec is to provide a great developer experience and reduce cognitive load. The product follows industry standards and stands by a pledge to help developers “fight the scripting hell”. While operation teams define golden paths for developers, without restricting them, developers can perform tasks like spinning up new environments or deploy apps on their own, without having to be an expert in every tool. As Humanitec can be used on top of any existing DevOps tooling without the need to restructure configs, the time to set it up is comparably low. As an example, it usually takes no longer than few hours to set up and deploy an application with all required dependencies (DBs, Storage, DNS, etc.). Different levels of abstractions guarantee onboarding within days for developers, speeding up considerably the time a new hire needs to get up to speed with the current setup.

Background

Humanitec was designed by a team of former Google employees who contributed to Google’s IDP. Humanitec’s development team wanted to create a Google-level system that was accessible to all developers. The company is VC-backed.

Humanitec main features

Dynamic Configuration Management

Dynamic Configuration Management (DCM) is a methodology used to structure the configuration of compute workloads. Developers create workload specifications, describing everything their workloads need to run successfully. The specification is then used to dynamically create the configuration, to deploy the workload in a specific environment. With DCM, developers do not need to define or maintain any environment-specific configuration for their workloads.

Open integrations 

Humanitec gives operation teams access to an open source driver library to integrate any tool and tech they already use or workflows such as GitOps and IaC. Developers can also create custom drivers for their IDP.

Policies (RBAC, security, compliance)

A dynamic Internal Developer Platform using Humanitec's Platform Orchestrator enables standardization by design and provides a granular RBAC model for better compliance, security and structured workflows.