Happiness-as-code

In the cloud era, where version control, reliability, repeatability and idempotency are top of mind  it seems like everything-as-code is the new norm. Public cloud and private infrastructure resources are most effective when their lifecycle, configuration, and security are managed in code and deployed through automation. These practices improve consistency, supportability, and tighten security holes. This powerful combination of source code management and automated deployment has been used in the software development space for a long time with great success. How can we take this concept and apply it to broader business areas? Why would we want to do this?--to make "happiness-as-code" a reality for everyone in our organization. Organized data leads to organized and happy humans. Check out this talk given by Seth Vargo, a Developer Advocate at Google, as he dives into the intricacies of everything-as-code and everything you should know about to get started.

At LucidPoint, we think all businesses are data-driven organizations. Whether you're managing source code, customer sales records, or even a staffing schedule, these are all data requiring multiple humans to interact with over time. Given the importance of tracking this business information, how do you manage copies of this data for backup? How do you collaborate on improvements of that data or configuration over time? How do you secure access to that information?

All of these practices can be embodied in an effective source control and collaboration system like GitLab. At LucidPoint we use GitLab not only for our own source code development, but also these additional business functions:

1. Sales opportunity management
2. Resource scheduling
3. Data access controls
4. Support escalations
5. Source code enhancements

Gitlab has become a central repository for all of our electronic records that would otherwise be scattered across disconnected tools. Consolidating these items to a common platform lets us maintain a single pane of glass and make valuable integrations between different data types and tasks. All of the configuration rules, data templates, access controls, and more are managed as code directly in GitLab. Collaboration and resolving conflicts, whether in complex source code or a sales opportunity record, use GitLab's excellent branching & merging capabilities for resolution.

For example, as a Sales opportunity is tracked and eventually booked by our Sales team, all of the customer information, schedule, and resource requirements are captured together. This info feeds into resource scheduling and allows us to securely add access for delivery engineers & other teammates. As projects progress, tracking related support requests or enhancements needed to code are all managed in similar work streams with issue tracking and branching & merging for changes. Since all of this data is in one system, security policy is simplified through GitLab's group management. Sales and contact data directly feeds the delivery engineers for the work; no complex CRM to engineering tool integration is needed. The data naturally moves from task to task and across workstreams within the same GitLab environment.

GitLab helps LucidPoint manage all of our electronic records and collaborate across time zones, backup/restore the data, and secure access to our most important information. This is a happy data management solution with happy humans participating. Happiness-as-code achievement unlocked!

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Author: ​Eric Lozano

Sr. Cloud Engineer