End-to-End Platform Builder

nMacFounder Xavier Millot wanted to simplify all these operations of is a no/low-code platform that allows engineers to create custom operations platforms for cloud-native infrastructure. It simplifies complex DevOps processes by offering tools for building, tracking, and managing infrastructure with minimal code, making it easier to streamline workflows, consolidate tooling, and reduce costs.

The team needed guidance on how the tool would work and what we need to build, and more importantly, the things we WON’T.

My Objectives:

Build a system for a web-only dashboards that can bring infrastructure into one place so a team collaborate, monitor and program applications.

My Checklist:

• [ ] Assets all sections of the platform to determine what we will build an how.
  • [ ] ?
• [ ] Fast-track design development time reduce ambiguity

Brainstorm + Research (.5 month)

Conferences attended and CEO brainstorming notes.

Key Learnings

1. Before getting to beautiful dashboards, there is a lot of data transformations that need to take place.
2. Queries, Operations, Tasks, can then be applied to imported data.
3. Results of functions can be used by others as data sources (including dashboard widgets).

Approach (4 months)

1. Takes place in the app:

Onboarding:

Account creation + Integrating data from sources like Kubernetes, GitHub, and OpenTelemetry, into nMachine.

Data Transformation:

Once data is imported, add hooks functions or associate resources.

Observability:

Open telemetry tools for metric, log queries and traces.

Visualizing:

Building widget pages.

2. Identify our types of users:

• “Platform” Engineer (admin)

Full account permissions

Key Focus:

• Onboarding.
• Transforming
• Observability

• Viewer (user)

Limited account permissions

Key Focus:

• Visualizing

Key Difference (experience):

1. Configuration tools.
2. Publishing permission.

3. Sitemap

Navigation will be challenging if we don’t outline the our architecture in an intuitive was for engineers that are used to navigating tools a certain way

Drew out every task and activity taking place in the app grouped them by qualities

Organized around the activities taking place

Key Learnings

1. The following libraries had elements we can use for authentication, code composition, charts and logs.
2. We could use custom wrappers to ensure visual consistency.

Highcharts

ANT Charts

Ms Monaco

Auth0