Optimize application development

Today’s modern application development teams face a myriad of challenges that can slow down application delivery. The development landscape continues to get more complicated with the introduction of more complex frameworks, microservices, application programming interfaces (APIs), security protocols, and more. 

This has left many teams struggling with the effects of complex environment setups, inconsistent tooling, long onboarding times, and a lack of adequate automation—including hindered developer productivity and collaboration, repetitive manual tasks, increased errors, and overall, slower application delivery cycles.

These issues are exacerbated by growing concerns about software supply chain security—including increasing cyberthreats and difficulty with manual audits and policy enforcement—and infrastructure and application modernization challenges.

To help solve these challenges, streamline application development processes, and address your unique needs, your organization should consider adopting a platform engineering approach and integrating platform engineers into your development processes.

Platform engineering can be applied as a specific job role, or as a methodology that is taken on as a team initiative. It is centered around the idea that your application developers should be treated as the customer, with developer experience being prioritized to help development teams unlock their full potential. Platform engineers should act as de facto product managers for their application platform, working with feedback loops to understand developer needs and using developer input to guide platform design and feature prioritization that helps developers optimize their processes. 

Platform engineers are responsible for addressing the needs of your application development teams in a standardized fashion, including building and maintaining infrastructure and an internal developer platform (IDP), enforcing consistency across environments and integration with continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, and offering tools and resources for streamlined migration and development. They can curate customized sets of tools and processes that match your unique needs, and create self-service capabilities and automated infrastructure.

Adding platform engineers to your organization helps you to:

• Improve developer productivity by providing your application development teams with tools and processes that best suit their requirements.
• Create a consistent developer experience with integrated toolchains and processes, while maintaining a focus on security, compliance, and governance.
• Foster increased collaboration between various teams with standardized development environments and workflows.

To help organizations successfully adopt a platform engineering approach, Red Hat has developed the Red Hat Advanced Developer Suite. This bundled offering helps streamline complex development processes and enforce governance with self-service capabilities, automation, and safeguarded workflows across hybrid cloud environments.

This is achieved by providing platform engineers with a distinct set of integrated components to help them boost developer productivity, increase focus on security, and provide the tools their development teams need to optimize development cycles. 

Advanced Developer Suite is primarily composed of 3 key components that directly address today’s common application development challenges, including a tested and proven IDP, a trusted software supply chain, and tools and resources that help you achieve your modernization and cloud-native development goals.

Internal developer platform

An IDP serves as your organization’s single source of truth for application development teams, and the self-service access point to all shared development tools and frameworks, which helps increase developer productivity and improve the developer experience.

Advanced Developer Suite provides an IDP that offers:

• Streamlined and consistent development workflows with automated software templates, self-services capabilities, and a central source of truth.
• Instant onboarding with preconfigured, trusted environments, integrated services, and curated tools.
• Streamlined automation for development tasks and deployment pipelines to minimize errors, accelerate iterations, and enforce consistent security practices.

Trusted software supply chain 

Advanced Developer Suite can help your organization tackle software security and compliance risks that are brought on by increased cyberthreats, software vulnerabilities, and ad-hoc processes, and exacerbated by manual audits, inconsistent policy enforcement, and limited visibility into system security posture.

This is made possible by creating a trusted software supply chain with tools that help you automate common security needs right from the development phase, to create scalable policy enforcement and seamless CI/CD pipelines, including:

• Automated signing and verification with key/keyless signing, cryptographic verification, and a model validation controller to enforce software integrity.
• Provenance and attestation with an immutable ledger that provides end-to-end traceability with attestation in an immutable audit trail.
• Trusted content and policy-based remediation guidance to help teams adopt trusted components and remediate risks.
• Integrated supply chain security, including integration with customer-preferred CI/CD tools and embedded security guardrails in the development lifecycle.

Modernization and cloud-native development

Without automation and standardized development environments, inconsistencies between development and production can slow your productivity, while challenges with container tooling, integration, and security can make cloud-native transformation difficult.

Advanced Developer Suite can help you overcome those challenges and achieve your modernization and cloud-native development goals, through capabilities that include:

• Ready-to-code, containerized workspaces that are accessible through a browser for consistent and collaborative development without complex local setup.
• Migration toolkits and automated workload migration to help reduce complexity and mitigate risks when transitioning to cloud or hybrid environments.
• Docker-compatible, rootless container management that helps enhance focus on security while maintaining ease of use on developer workstations. 

If your organization is seeking to improve the developer experience, you may also be looking for guided expertise and targeted training to help streamline the adoption of platform engineering practices and accelerate time to value of your investment.

Red Hat Consulting provides the mentoring you need to successfully empower your developers, streamline operations, and accelerate application delivery. Adopt platform engineering through a phased approach that consists of 2 unique service offerings: the Developer Experience Assessment and the Advanced Developer Suite Pilot.

Developer Experience Assessment

This service offering from Red Hat Consulting is designed to help your organization identify and map your pain points, specifically as they relate to your developer experience and the tools and processes available to them.

As the initial part of your journey to accelerate adoption and the time to value of your investment in Advanced Developer Suite, the Developer Experience Assessment provides access to expertise and mentoring from Red Hat Consulting to help you:

• Analyze the current state of your application developer onboarding process.
• Identify pain points your developers are experiencing with tools and processes.
• Increase alignment between your platform and developer teams.
• Strategize and plan for your desired developer experience.

With these key business outcomes achieved, Red Hat Consulting will conclude this phase by:

• Identifying points of friction and business priorities through a classroom-style discovery workshop.

• Providing a prioritized roadmap for further enhancing your developer experience.

Advanced Developer Suite Pilot

Following the Developer Experience Assessment, the next recommended phase in your journey to adopting and building value with platform engineering is the Advanced Developer Suite Pilot service offering. Red Hat Consulting takes the findings from the Assessment and helps your teams build a self-managed software catalog to streamline onboarding and vulnerability management at code. 

Red Hat Consulting helps your organization implement and operationalize the bundle of tools offered through the Advanced Developer Suite—including Red Hat Developer Hub, Red Hat Trusted Application Signer, and Red Hat Trusted Profile Analyzer—to create a trusted software supply chain and improve your focus on developer productivity and security. This is achieved by teaching your teams to:

• Deploy and customize an IDP by Red Hat Developer Hub that is integrated within your current environments and teams.
• Integrate Red Hat Developer Hub and Red Hat Trusted Application Signer to enhance existing environments and establish a unified trusted software supply chain.
• Streamline application onboarding with software templates using secure pipelines that includes signed attestation, software bills of materials (SBOMs), and vulnerability scanning.
• Improve software security focus by implementing cryptographic signing and verification, and streamlining vulnerability management using Trusted Profile Analyzer.

In addition to the expertise and guidance provided by Red Hat Consulting, Red Hat Services also offers further mentoring and technical support through Red Hat Technical Account Management, including some specific offerings for application development and platform engineering, and expert-created training to help deepen your teams’ capabilities through Red Hat Training and Certification.

Red Hat Training and Certification provides a number of curriculum offerings designed specifically for developers that help your teams build the needed skills to get the most from your investment. This includes courses that cover deploying containers, developing containerized applications, managing container storage, and using automated DevOps pipelines, with constantly evolving course specializations to choose from.

Working with a Red Hat Technical Account Manager (TAM) helps your organization prevent and solve IT issues to operate security-focused and resilient platforms—with support for every step of your Red Hat technology journey. After becoming deeply familiar with your IT environment, a Red Hat TAM provides expertise to help mitigate risk and safeguard your infrastructure, and serves as your single point of contact to advise on key IT issues and advocate internally within Red Hat for your organization’s specific needs.

Speak to an expert from Red Hat Consulting to discuss how the Developer Experience Assessment can streamline your platform adoption and time to value, and ultimately, help your organization optimize and accelerate your application development processes.