Introducing Service Creation from OpsLevel

What does it look like today when a developer in your organization needs to create a new microservice? Most likely it’s a fragmented, error-prone process:

• A process doc stored in a wiki somewhere with a long checklist of (mostly manual) steps–some of which are definitely out of date.‍
• No org-wide standard. Some teams tinker with CLI-based scaffolding generators, while others rely on cloning a repo that was designated as the “right” template for their team–9 months ago.‍
• Developers pinging colleagues for help and copy-pasting boilerplate code because there's some bureaucratic hurdle or process gap they don't want to deal with.

A holistic approach to Service Ownership and Maturity

A lot goes into creating a new service, so it’s understandable that many teams haven’t found a sustainable solution yet.

But creating a new service is a high-leverage moment; it’s much simpler to operate and maintain that service in the future if it’s built on a solid foundation.

‍

 That’s why we believe an automated, user-friendly, and centralized process, like Service Creation, is a must-have for any organization serious about service ownership.

For Developers

With Service Creation, developers get to skip ahead to the correct starting point every time. No more wasting cycles trying to remember or figure out how to get there. No more worrying about which standards are relevant or double-checking that they’ve configured the plumbing correctly.

Worrying about whether they have the right library versions, or access to create new repositories, or installing the right scaffolding generator is not how most developers want to spend their time.

They want to write meaningful code, solve actual problems, and move that story or epic to done.

Service Creation in OpsLevel helps developers get there faster. And it makes it easy for them to do the right things; faster doesn’t have to mean cutting corners.

For Platform Engineers

If there’s one group that deeply cares about standards being easy to adhere to, it’s Platform Engineering.

Infra, SRE, and Platform teams have a lot of responsibilities to juggle (developer experience, reliability, and security, etc,) and are typically outnumbered by their product development teammates by at least 5x. So they need to operate with serious leverage. Service Creation lets them do that. It gives them:

• a central place to curate approved templates
• a high-leverage way to control and push out best practices
• the ability to implement guardrails while giving developers more autonomy 

For Engineering Leaders

Creating a new service is a critical workflow for software engineering teams. But it’s a workflow that’s historically been hard to regulate (other than throwing up bureaucratic hurdles for developers). There’s now a better way.

Service Creation templates are centrally managed–and easily updated–by admins. This means all developers build from the right starting point, which includes an org’s best practices.

So services are starting on the right foot and the burden of future Service Maturity work is reduced. And it all happens without bureaucracy or manual toil.

With consistency in an important workflow, engineer leaders can redirect their time, energy, and scrutiny to other priorities.

So how does it work?

Under the hood, Service Creation uses open-source command-line utility Cookiecutter to create new services from templates.

Cookiecutter is a powerful and very extensible utility. It’s agnostic to language or other tooling and even allows you to define actions to take before or after template files are generated in the form of pre- and post-generate hooks–so your automated workflows can be very sophisticated.

But it’s not an intuitive developer experience, especially at scale. With OpsLevel, teams get the best of Cookiecutter and a cleaner, more controlled experience.

Developers don’t have to:

• install or maintain Cookiecutter themselves
• find or verify Cookiecutter templates
• remember or references variable input options
• cleanup templates after service creation

Instead, all developers have access to Cookiecutter and their organization’s approved templates (chosen, customized, and published by their Platform team) through OpsLevel.

You can click the green button to view the walkthrough in fullscreen. Or learn more about importing and using Cookiecutter templates in our docs.

Get started on the right foot

Standardizing and automating your new service creation workflow has many benefits. Building on the right foundations, removing uncertainty, reducing the opportunity for human error, and preempting future maintenance, tech debt, and toil – just to name a few.

Plus, it’s a capability that has something for everyone in your engineering organization. Whether you’re building new services manually, or already tinkering with utilities like Cookiecutter, we’re ready to help you make the switch to our centralized, automated solution.

Request your demo today to see Service Creation in action.