(If you haven't read the high level overview, Simple x "Never" = Insane, you might want to start there.)
By "internal tool", I mean apps that engineers build for Ops to do semi-manual tasks. And when I say "apps" I'm talking about really simple apps.
The Parts
- Business logic (e.g. API endpoint)
- Simple interface (e.g. a few inputs and simple guardrails on a React app)
- Dumb "glue" logic (e.g. transforming tabular output into JSON input)
- Dumb external API logic (e.g. dig through the Stripe docs to make a simple POST)
- Other things: authentication, organization if there are many tools (site structure, search, etc), permissioning, audit logs, observability, bug reporting, infrastructure and deployment potentially.
The Question
Okay, so the engineer needs to do #1. But the engineer doesn't really need to do #2 - #5. So how can #2 - #5 be automated or offloaded onto Ops?