Red Hat Consulting: Application Platform Foundations

Many organizations have successfully established a robust cloud-native foundation with Red Hat® OpenShift®. Now they are finding that their primary challenge has shifted from creating the platform to optimizing the experience of building on it. Without a standardized approach, the potential for a faster time to market is often squandered as organizations struggle with DIY workflows and growing technical debt. 

Even when the underlying technology is sound, the developer experience often remains fragmented. This forces teams to navigate ad-hoc processes that drain productivity and stall the inner loop of creation. To recover lost developer time and maximize platform investments, organizations must turn their investments into a standardized software factory. 

A lack of standardization creates barriers that extend beyond the deployment pipeline. Tool sprawl and disconnected workflows make it difficult to integrate AI effectively, leading to inconsistent developer environments and missed innovation. Furthermore, a fragmented foundation leaves the software supply chain vulnerable and increases security risks. 

The Red Hat Consulting: Application Platform Foundation engagement addresses these hurdles, eliminating tool sprawl and reducing technical debt to help organizations realize the full value of their IT investments. This engagement will help organizations automate the path to production so they can focus on delivering high-value code rather than managing complex, disparate tools.

To move from good to great, organizations work with Red Hat Consulting to evolve their fragmented do-it-yourself approach into a standardized, scalable software factory with the Application Platform Foundations engagement. This process recovers valuable time lost to inefficiency by creating a security-focused, automated path to production. The Application Platform Foundations engagement helps operations and development teams work together to speed up software delivery while maintaining stability and security. The engagement is delivered through 3 core pillars:

• Establish a strategy and foundation: Move beyond fragmented software development lifecycle processes and home-built tooling by aligning business objectives with a tailored developer experience strategy. Red Hat experts conduct a formal Developer Experience Assessment and software development lifecycle (SDLC) gap analysis in order to identify specific friction points and map an organization’s value stream. This discovery process provides the strategic blueprint required to transition the existing environment into a standardized platform that balances operational guidelines with developer productivity.
• Unify the developer experience and build the software factory: Translate the strategy into a reality by implementing the technical guardrails and automation required for a modern platform. Establish a GitOps control plane, architect secure continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) patterns, and standardize release engineering to ensure a consistent, repeatable delivery process.
• Onboard and scale teams: Initial application teams will create migration playbooks, workload archetypes, and repeatable golden paths that help future teams containerize and deploy applications with self-service ease.

This engagement can be fully customized based on the findings from the initial assessment. Week-to-week, our experts will work with organizations to address the developer experience and accelerate modernization. Table 1 is an example of what an Application Platform Foundations engagement could look like.

Table 1. Example of an Application Platform Foundations schedule
 

Developer Experience Assessment

The Application Platform Foundations journey begins with a strategic Developer Experience Assessment. This discovery phase moves beyond anecdotal feedback to provide a data-driven blueprint for a software factory, focusing on:

• Discovery and gap analysis: Through classroom-style workshops, Red Hat Consulting will analyze an organization’s current SDLC maturity, knowledge gaps, and team collaboration to identify exactly where friction exists between IT operations and development.
• Value stream mapping: Map existing workflows to uncover hidden bottlenecks. By value-slicing work based on business impact, Red Hat Consulting will help prioritize the automation and tools that will deliver the fastest return on investment (ROI) to developers.
• Strategic roadmap and high-level design (HLD): The assessment concludes with an HLD and a phased transformation roadmap. This will outline the technical architecture, timing, and execution plan needed to evolve a platform into a high-velocity ecosystem.

Once the Developer Experience Assessment is complete, Red Hat Consulting translates those findings into an execution plan. This phase focuses on creating a security-focused, automated delivery lifecycle (the outer loop) and then optimizing the developer’s local environment (the inner loop) to use it.

Build the software factory (outer loop)

Red Hat Consulting helps organizations establish a reliable, security-focused, and automated path to production with the foundational software factory. By automating security and infrastructure policies directly into the delivery process, we remove the burden of manual environment management from the developer’s workflow. To achieve this, the Application Platform Foundations engagement focuses on: 

• GitOps and policy-driven orchestration: Implement a GitOps approach to manage application configurations and automated promotion pipeline deployments using Infrastructure as Code (IaC). This approach leads to a delivery process that is repeatable, auditable, and consistent across all stages.
• Standardized CI/CD pipelines: Use Red Hat OpenShift Pipelines to standardize build and test phases. This provides teams with preconfigured, language-specific pipelines that allow for a unified and high-quality delivery process.
• Release engineering and security validation: Integrate secrets orchestration, automate security policy enforcement, and certify base images with integrated monitoring to get the factory ready for production. 

While the Application Platform Foundations engagement establishes a technical and organizational foundation, Red Hat Training and Certification and Red Hat Technical Account Management are available to complement your journey and ensure long-term success. Red Hat experts can recommend a tailored curriculum based on the findings in the Developer Experience Assessment. This role-based learning allows platform engineers to focus on building skills to manage a production-grade software factory, while developers can upskill in cloud-native development. Through self-paced learning or instructor-led courses, Red Hat Training and Certification helps organizations remain self-sufficient, even after the Application Platform Foundations engagement is complete. 

Red Hat Technical Account Managers (TAMs) can also be paired with your organization to act as strategic collaborators beyond the engagement. By providing a single point of contact for proactive lifecycle planning and critical issue resolution, TAMs help protect your IT investment and establish your software factory as a stable environment for continuous innovation. 

Speak to an expert from Red Hat Consulting to discuss how the Application Platform Foundation engagement can help unify developer productivity and build your software factory.