What is Humanitec?

Profile

The Platform Orchestrator is a flexible, highly customizable product that glues together enterprise toolchains and infrastructure components, enabling end-to-end developer self-service and standardization across teams. This results in 4x higher deployment frequency, 75% less Ops overhead, and 30% faster lead time. Enterprises that use the Platform Orchestrator can build and roll out their platforms in weeks instead of months or years.

Platform engineering teams use the Platform Orchestrator to design golden paths and define clear conventions for their org. Developers simply describe what resources their workloads need to run using the open-source workload specification Score (or the UI, CLI, API). The orchestrator follows a Read, Match, Create, Deploy (RMCD) standard. It reads the developer's request, matches it to the rules and conventions defined by the platform team, creates the respective resources (or connects to existing ones) and deploys the workload (or hands over to an existing deployment tool, e.g. ArgoCD).

Focus

The Humanitec Platform Orchestrator is easily extensible through a library of open-source drivers. With the Platform Orchestrator app and infra configs are generated with every new deployment, reducing manual configuration by +90% and driving standardization across teams and workflows. Previously complex tasks like adding new resources, changing configs, or rollbacks can be executed with a simple git-push or a single click in the UI. Developers no longer have to wait and can move much faster. 

Both platform engineers and application developers can use Score (the Humanitec OSS workload specification) as a code-based interaction method. Alternatively, the CLI, UI or API can be used to set templates and roles by platform teams or developers to self-serve infrastructure.  

This enables: 

• Operations to define golden paths and workflows to reduce Ops overhead and kill ticket ops
• Developers to self-serve the tech and tools they need to run their apps
• The whole software engineering organization to increase deployment frequency, reduce lead time, and speed up time to market 

Humanitec has five fundamental product principles: 

1. Integrate and embrace: Through this strategy, Humanitec works well in tandem with developer portals like Backstage, deployment tools like ArgoCD, and any CI or IaC setups (e.g. Terraform) to meet enterprise brownfield needs. 

2. Openness: Humanitec pledges that developers of any skill level can effectively use the tool to “fight the scripting hell.”

3. Zero lock-ins: With this promise, Humanitec releases users from dependency on a vendor for products or services.

4. Following industry conventions: Since Humanitec doesn’t believe in reinventing the wheel, they adhere to industry standards to streamline IDP development.

5. Platform as a product: Humanitec believes in treating the platform as a product. Platform teams act as product teams, iterating on the platform based on customer (developer) feedback.

Background

Humanitec is a VC-financed company founded on a mission to make platform engineering and IDPs easy to adopt and roll out in complex enterprise setups at scale. The company was started by a team of developers who wanted to create a Google-level system available to all organizations, and share their learnings from building Google’s IDP.

Platform Orchestrator's main features

Standardization by design

Platform teams use the Platform Orchestrator to standardize and automate infrastructure provisioning and config management, which allows developers to focus on delivering applications. This relieves the burden of the developer's cognitive load and helps reduce infrastructure sprawl along with the number of config files to deal with.

Dynamic Configuration Management

The Platform Orchestrator enables Dynamic Configuration Management (DCM), a methodology used to structure compute workload configuration. Developers use a workload specification like Scoreto describe everything their workload need to run successfully. By taking a dynamic approach to config management, Ops and platform teams can drive standardization, separation of concerns, and a better developer experience (DevEx).

Greater security and compliance 

With the Platform Orchestrator, developers simply consume standardized versions of infrastructure and configs. This helps reduce the risk of human error and ensures compliance and consistency across environments and infrastructure.

Enhanced DevEx

An IDP built with Humanitec reduces developers' complexity when building and operating their apps, allowing them to focus on writing code, deliver features faster, and slashing lead time across teams.

Open integrations 

Humanitec gives Ops 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.

Although Humanitec is frequently shipping new features, supporting product documentation is lacking. Functionality is growing so fast, making it hard to keep track. Ideally, the documentation would be updated in tandem with new capabilities.