Tired of DevOps threads yet?

Kinetic ERP
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Maybe, but the need is still there.

There has been a new story evolving around the DevOps circles, and it is called Platform Engineering. Microsoft explains:

Platform engineering is a practice built up from DevOps principles that seeks to improve each development team’s security, compliance, costs, and time-to-business value through improved developer experiences and self-service within a secure, governed framework.

The idea is to simplify the developer’s life by making it easier to conform to company standards and build in good security practices. This is done through an Internal Developer Portal. There are a few free tools that help companies create the IDP (all caps, and not IdP, which is Identity Provider because reasons.)

Backstage was developed by Spotify and was open sourced:

Another is called Port:

The idea behind the Developer Portals is that when a request comes in for an app, site, etc., the developer goes to the portal and picks a template that will scaffold the project with the company’s standards that provide consistency and security. The portal keeps track of who requested the project, why it was requested, and where the source code and documentation are. It then allows the developer to deploy to test or staging, keeping track of which version was deployed.

Now, these systems were created for the needs of LARGE development teams with sizes into the 100s or 1000s. But the idea would be nice for smaller shops because of the self-documentation and will answer questions like this post.

Documenting Changes Made in Epicor - Kinetic 202X

Anyway, food for thought for 2024 and maybe a product idea for Epicor. :person_shrugging:

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Mark,

Keep the pressure on! Better DevOps will help Epicor as well as all of us…

The reason we don’t drink the “update often, don’t worry, a dot-release won’t change anything” Cool-Aid is we got burned the first time we tried it a few years ago. Some logic was changed that effectively limited counter sales prefixes to 1 character, but we had 2 in our company config. This brought counter sales to a screeching halt while EpiCare figured out what was wrong from that dot release update.

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How could dependencies like that be caught with better DevOps?

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This is where I see Playwright or Postman tests working in our favor. We would create the same REST calls to create a Counter Sale. It would have failed letting you know that it didn’t work. I can’t see upgrading more often without some kind of automated testing. Unfortunately, tests are hard to share since we have different business processes, but we should be able to automate what we do manually.