Witboost with batteries included
Today marks a milestone for Witboost, as it brings forth the open-source release of our Starter Kit. This launch is a stepping stone towards creating a comprehensive ecosystem around Witboost. The intent is to make adopting and integrating any technology, system, or pattern as effortless as possible, while simultaneously maintaining the capacity of companies to adopt their practices and determine their usage standards of a specific technology.
The concept of self-service technology within an organization can materialize in a multitude of ways, each carrying a unique balance of trade-offs. These might shape the user freedom, create ‘golden paths’, safeguard data security, enforce compliance, or adhere to security principles like authorization, technical users, audits, etc.
At the heart of Witboost is our commitment to giving users the power to define how a technology will be deployed and used by end-users once it is transitioned to a self-service model. To this end, we have introduced the concept of ‘starter kits’ in Witboost. These kits are a curated set of components designed to empower an organization to rapidly adopt a technology. They ensure that the technology is truly self-service while also enabling clear definition of all necessary trade-offs.
In today’s dynamic tech landscape, replete with self-service platforms and SaaS solutions, organizations often find themselves making compromises dictated by the technology itself. Witboost offers an alternative: a platform that lets you call the shots. It provides the flexibility to construct a bespoke platform by integrating various platforms, defining unique automation mechanisms, and customizing technology use within your organization according to your rules.
By harnessing the power of Witboost, adopters can extend and tailor the base functionalities of the tool. This flexibility facilitates the integration of new technologies, the development of new policies, and the introduction of constraints, processes, or practices. Witboost stands out as a truly technology-agnostic platform, promising future-proofing — it won’t become obsolete with time as it can be continually reshaped in response to evolving drivers and constraints.
Witboost achieves this degree of flexibility and control through five key components:
- Templates: Templates provide a structured pathway or ‘golden path’ for users, setting clear expectations and establishing best practices for technology use.
- Policies: These create quality gates on how a technology can and should be used by users. They also allow defining rules of interaction between platform users, such as the definition and compliance with data contracts.
Furthermore, they facilitate the standardization of a specific pattern intended to be systematic (e.g., the standardization of an Output Port within a Data Mesh implementation).
3. Provisioners: These automate the life cycle of a resource tied to a technology, adhering to the dictates of the organization, outside of which it’s not possible to operate. Creation of resources, ACL management, application deployment are just some of the use cases that can be implemented.
4. Webhooks: These enable the customization of data production and consumption processes by integrating them with pre-existing business procedures. Integration with BPM, ticketing systems, authorization workflows, and anything else that adapts self-service policies to corporate standards regarding compliance, security, audit, or change management processes is feasible.
5. Marketplace Plugins: These enable the integration of additional informative sources within the marketplace to provide better transparency to users and enhance the data discovery experience. Examples of information that can be integrated into the marketplace include billing information to set-up FinOps culture and practices, data observability info to improve trust in data, access control, audit, and usage information.
These components of Witboost grant adopters full implementative power, facilitating the customization and integration of any technology. This adaptability is why Witboost is designed to be extended by implementing microservices that adhere to a specific API contract, allowing these extension microservices to be registered within the platform. Here you can find the API documentation ( Witboost API | Witboost (agilelab.it) )
Witboost’s Starter Kit is a concrete set of open-source implementations of these five extension points. Released progressively as they get consolidated, these starter kits aim to minimize the customization effort required by our customers.
In the realm of provisioners, we offer base implementations for specific technologies along with two blueprints — Terraform, facilitating the reuse of previous investments in infrastructure automation, and Python, providing a scaffold for creating provisioners without the concern of adhering to the API contract.
With its distinctive features, Witboost stands out as a strategic asset for any company aiming for technological transformation, always keeping them a step ahead.
