Make Platform Resources Machine Readable

When you build and evolve a managed platform, there are a variety of resources to think and reason about. These could be:

1. Local dependencies – file system (local, network based mounts)
2. External dependencies – REST services (proprietary APIs, public APIs)
3. State stores – data stores (firm-hosted, cloud-hosted stores,…)
4. Platform services – services that manage the platform functionality (provisioning, runtime management, operational tooling,…)
5. Managed Resources – these are resources that your platform is managing on behalf of clients. These are the bread-and-butter abstraction over which you typically will have most control
6. Desired States – this is the list of features that must be made available for regular processing, when platform is being upgraded, when platform is undergoing routine maintenance, etc.

This isn’t an exhaustive list by any means but my intention is to summarize resources a managed platform is made up of. There are numerous benefits in making your platform machine readable. You can now:

• Think about the assumptions your team is making about non-functional requirements and characteristics of your internal services, dependencies, and managed resources. These would be things like response time, availability, etc. and can help you design and tune integration proxies.
• Catalogue features that are important for your clients and under what conditions (e.g. ability to handle a provisioned resource, upgrading, etc.). More specifically, define the relationship between features and resource dependencies.
• Define all these elements in a single, consistent, machine readable definition. This will allow your team to view resources and their state, visualize and report feature dependencies.
• Design/ implement feature toggling – feature states can be derived using resources
• Apply self-healing techniques – reset resource (e.g. close and re-initialize a corrupt connection pool, automatically start service instances in the event of a host crashing, etc.)

I will explore each of these points in much more detail in follow up posts. Needless to say, getting your platform in a machine readable state has several benefits.