Reducing toil with managed services

In the previous section, we discussed the efforts involved in maintaining a platform for building applications and services. Many of the activities described in making sure the environment is always up and running could involve some toil. For example, Google’s SRE handbook (https://sre.google/sre-book/eliminating-toil/) goes further into the elements of IT tasks that could be considered toil.

If we are able to avoid toil and know that a provider manages the underlying build infrastructure, we are able to focus on what is more important, the application that helps drive our business. This is one of the goals of managed services, letting the provider handle the underlying details, providing a consistent syntax that becomes the common language between teams, providing compute resources as needed, and not billing when the service is not being utilized.

It is one less component of a build pipeline to consider as the provider is maintaining the underlying infrastructure and they are able to provide the team with scale when needed at any given time. The MSP would be responsible for making sure that there are enough workers in order to execute all the jobs in the build pipeline. However, managed services could also be seen as a form of lock-in to a particular vendor or cloud provider. In most cases, a managed service typically has the best integration to services provided by the offering provider. This is where adding additional capabilities are much more streamlined, but not limited, to the following:

• Triggering mechanisms
• Secrets management
• Securing communication and data transfer between integrated services
• Observability

The integrations are there to help save time and, in reference to the original theme of this book, allow an organization to focus on the application at hand. Though important topics are noted in the preceding section, the importance of a managed service to allow flexibility and a way to integrate third-party-specific capabilities is also important when choosing a managed service.

As noted earlier, if an organization chooses to manage their own build solution, they may be responsible for the availability of the platform. In the case of a managed service, the provider is responsible for the availability and may establish an SLA with the customer using its services. The customer would have to make the determination of whether the communicated SLA is acceptable to the business.

Managed services offered by providers reduce the amount of toil to keep the build platform up and running. They allow teams at an organization to focus on critical business functions or revenue-generating activities. In the case of on-premises, not having to wait for hardware procurement or setup allows for maximum business flexibility. The provider would be responsible for making sure the platform is up to date and allowing for fast-paced groups within the organization to experiment with newer capabilities.