Designing Our Golden Path: The Prime Route

The notion behind the Golden Path concept is to provide developers with pre-architected and supported approaches for building and deploying software. By adhering to the Prime Route, our teams can leverage a supported road to production without delving into the intricate details of the underlying technologies. It acts as a driving force, expediting the progress of application development processes, the integration of new team members and the launch of new applications. It accomplishes this by infusing our extensive expertise and incorporating the most effective methodologies we have acquired over time.

The Prime Route encompasses several crucial ingredients, each designed to facilitate a seamless development experience and promote uniformity across the application portfolio.

1. Repository Template: We offer a comprehensive repository template to kickstart projects. This template serves as a foundation, providing an application equipped with key resources and configurations. It ensures that developers can quickly get started with our IDEs and embrace the best practices we advocate for code development.
2. Pipeline: Our Prime Route includes a robust pipeline that automates the entire software delivery process. This pipeline takes the repository template and builds it, ensuring that the resulting artifacts progress seamlessly toward production. By incorporating all the necessary steps required for gaining trust in the code being deployed, our pipeline guarantees a reliable and secure pathway to success.
3. Manifests for Deployment: In modern software development, deployment is often orchestrated using automated tools. To simplify this process, we provide a set of manifests tailored to specific needs. These deployment manifests encapsulate the necessary configurations and instructions for launching an application efficiently.
4. Observability Capability: Observability is a foundational aspect of any robust software system. Understanding this, we ensure that our Prime Route bakes in observability capabilities from the start. This includes provisions for logs, traces, metrics, and alerts, which enable effective monitoring and troubleshooting. We provide reasonable defaults for observability settings, ensuring that teams have a solid foundation for gaining insights into the application’s performance and health.

The characteristics of our Prime Route further enhance its value and applicability within our Internal Developer Platform (IDP) context.

1. Optional Approach: Our Prime Route is not intended to be the only way of doing things within our IDP. We firmly believe in fostering innovation and providing room for teams to explore alternative approaches. While the Prime Route provides a supported and streamlined route, we actively encourage teams to venture outside of the beaten path when necessary. We closely observe such cases and identify potential areas where new Golden Paths can be forged to cater to evolving technology landscapes or varying team preferences.
2. Transparent Abstractions: The abstractions offered by our Prime Route are designed to be transparent. While we provide a user-friendly interface to simplify the developer experience and reduce the barriers to getting started, we also ensure that the underlying technologies and processes remain accessible. Developers have the freedom to delve deeper into the inner workings of the Prime Route, fostering trust and enabling a shift-left approach where teams are empowered to take end-to-end responsibility for their code. This transparency ensures that our clients understand the core foundations of their development environment.
3. Extensibility: The Prime Route is not a rigid, one-size-fits-all solution. We recognize that different projects and teams may require additional capabilities beyond what the Prime Route encompasses. To accommodate this, our Prime Route is designed to be extensible. For example, within the pipeline, we allow for the integration of ancillary automations such as test data reload/refresh, general cleanup tasks, or specific tests that don’t need to run continuously. Similarly, our deployment manifests can be augmented with additional configurations to cater to specific requirements. However, we emphasize caution when extending the Prime Route to ensure compatibility and continued support.

At Hals & Hounds, we are committed to delivering exceptional design and development solutions tailored to our clients’ unique needs. Our Prime Route provides a well-architected and supported approach that accelerates application development, promotes best practices, and ensures uniformity across each team’s portfolio. By offering optional pathways, transparent abstractions, and extensibility, we enable our teams to embrace innovation while benefiting from a solid foundation. With the Prime Route, our developers can confidently navigate the ever-evolving technology landscape.