Self-servicing: empowering teams!

These days organizations are focusing on “self-servicing”; a way to empower teams. In fact many software companies have defined their own versions or are evolving on what is well known as “self-service catalog”. These self-service catalogs (that are hosted on a portal) allow teams to become independent on activities that otherwise are time-consuming and result in delayed deliveries. In a nutshell, the idea behind self servicing is to bring in “agility” and the catalog items address a complete use case that speeds up the process workflow. And all this is made possible through various tools and platforms that are integrated like ITSM tools, orchestrators, IAC tools (Terraform, Ansible, Chef, Puppet), etc.

With the increase in cloud adoption, organizations look forward for speed, resiliency, compliance and optimization. Building a self service catalog is an essential step towards agility that helps to avoid delays, manual dependencies and errors. IT companies define roadmaps for self-servicing and slowly mature on the catalog items. A cross-skilled team of experts is formed that is targeted to roll out these catalogs and they maintain the catalog items with their versions. They leverage various tools to operationalize the catalog and continuously seek feedback from the organization for further improvements. Obviously, nothing is rolled out all at once, it is released in stages based on the demand, the targeted audience and the resulting platform use cases (like IaaS, PaaS, CaaS, etc).

Let us take a look at some of the personas that realize the benefits of self-servicing-

• business users setting up training environments
• developers spinning up and decommissioning test environments
• operations team requesting for image level backups or managing snapshots
• scrum masters or project leads requesting for on-boarding new members to use DevOps tools
• network engineers creating VPC by mentioning the CIDR blocks
• security engineers requesting for security groups
• automation engineers requesting for service principals or certificates.

Based on different personas and the demand, the list gets huge. As the catalog evolves, the purpose is kept simple – avoid delays, faster time to market, remove dependencies. This way every team member is empowered to keep innovating rather than waiting and this is one of the key principles on DevOps !!

Those were some of my thoughts on self-servicing. What is your journey on self-servicing?