“Breaking Changes” with Viktor Farcic: a crossplane for managing the multi-cloud experience using APIs
I recently sat down with Viktor Farcic, developer advocate over at Upbound, about the opsification of everything across the enterprise, but more specifically, how Upbound sees enterprise organizations managing a multi-cloud experience using APIs. Viktor has this very pragmatic but brutally honest view of DevOps and the realities of enabling and empowering our developers. Normally I do a brainstorming session with my guests on Breaking Changes, but with Viktor, we just hit record and dove in.
Think Heroku: abstracting away the infrastructure
Much of my conversation with Viktor centered around the idea of “Heroku-like experiences” for developers within the enterprise. If you aren’t familiar with Heroku, it was one of the darlings of the developer community as the cloud began to take off. Developers really liked it because it abstracted away more of what is needed to deploy applications and APIs, which made things dead simple—and free to boot. Viktor proposes that we apply the same approach to abstracting away application and API deployment infrastructure internally within the enterprise, using Heroku-like experiences.
Make internal services accessible
Viktor and I both believe that the enterprise landscape of digital resources and capabilities should be available as a buffet of APIs. Viktor was very vocal about not wanting his teams to have to submit Jira tickets for any infrastructure needs. Instead, everything should be accessible via self-service microservices and mature API products. Viktor was very opinionated about flattening all of the services that an enterprise uses across cloud and infrastructure providers, as well as any service in use, into a standardized set of internal APIs that teams can use to provision, tear down, and automate with what they need to be successful.
Automate API operations
I left my Breaking Changes conversation with Viktor energized about the possibilities when it comes to an API-first enterprise. I know many folks are still heavily focused on APIs in service of their applications and integrations, but a whole new world opens up when you realize that your API infrastructure has APIs. I get pretty excited about the potential of API-automated API operations, and like Viktor, I feel that APIs are the only way we’ll be able to manage this increasingly sprawling technological landscape that has unfolded over the last 20 years. Think about how much more technology your enterprise has put in place in the last two decades. Now think about how much technology will be deployed over the next two decades. APIs and automation are the only ways we are going to make it all work.
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