The Power of Standardized Services for Engineers

Standards versus Standardized Services

First, we need to distinguish between standards and standardized services. Standards are often referred to as guidelines and specifications. Think of coding conventions (style, formatting, and naming), guidelines for CI/CD pipeline tools, or standards for selecting the right cloud provider. Similarly, there are standard security policies - covering authentication, authorization mechanisms, and encryption - which help mitigate risks across the board. Or standards for integration capabilities which assist in selecting the appropriate integration pattern, which may positively impact overall quality of your integration landscape. Maintaining standards works best if they are encapsulated within a robust governance framework.

Standardized services - on the other hand - are services engineers can use in their engineering journey uniformly across different contexts. Think of a code scanning solution which helps identify security vulnerabilities and compliance issues in your code during development. A container platform service with features like container orchestration and automated scaling, enabling management of containerized applications. Or a Gateway to deploy your API and expose your application, allowing seamless integration between your applications and internal and external consumers. Standardized services are regarded as standard due to their proven effectiveness in fulfilling engineering requirements.

And while both concepts are different, they do intersect. For instance, when standards are implemented to ensure standardized services are used in the right way.

Why a lack of standardization is a problem: silos and fragmentation

Why is standardizing so important? Firstly, in-company services often exist in various pockets or areas within an organization. This leads to diversity in usage patterns and unnecessary duplication with fragmentation as a result. It also means higher overhead costs associated with managing and supporting multiple scattered tools, applications, platforms and other services.

Secondly, the problem with a lack or limited standardization is that it necessitates a higher number of engineers with expertise in a specific area. Each non-standard service requires specialized knowledge of engineers to maintain them. For example, if an organization uses multiple API Management platforms, engineers willing to expose their application through an API need to understand the intricacies of each platform. 

Thirdly, non-standard services often lack in-company community support, documentation and may not be self-service. Engineers must then rely on their own expertise.

Benefits of standardization: centralized-, consistent and scalable services

By centralizing and standardizing what is fragmented, you enhance consistency for engineers. Centrally available services are much more discoverable and reusable, eliminating the need to figure out how things work again. Particularly if these are coupled with suggested Golden Paths. These stipulated established paths, based on experience, are the most efficient and desirable.

And finally, standardization leads to scalability. As a company grows, the usage of in-company services typically increases. Through standardization, provisioning in-company tech resources at a large scale becomes easier, enabling economies of scale. So by standardizing and centralizing, you bring the services much more in the open, leading to a transparent and scalable in-company IT environment.

Flexible Standardization: managing engineers’needs

While aiming for standardization, it is essential to provide engineers with what they need precisely when they need it. This can be challenging. The average standardized service, may not align with an engineer’s unique project’s demands. This is why it is so important that before deciding which service to standardize, you consider engineers’ needs, company strategy, and market developments. Taking this into account, you have a grounded start. As time goes on, it is important to reevaluate if a standardized service should remain a standardized service. Ask yourself, how do acceptance rates develop over time? Is there a commitment from engineers? And do they understand the strategic decision behind those standards? Standardization need not sacrifice agility, adaptability or flexibility.

Paving the path to Happy Engineers: the role of Managed Standardized Services

Picture providing engineers with standardized, user-friendly, services they can directly utilize in their engineering journey to create value for the end-users.

How 'Managed Standardized Services' support Engineers

At Rabobank, we aim to use the advantages of scalable standardized services by providing our engineers with what we refer to as ‘Managed Standardized Services.’ These services cover a wide array of engineering needs throughout various stages — from design and development to deployment, to observability and integration. Additionally, these services offer insights into adherence to enterprise compliance.

By doing so, we equip our engineers with essential building blocks for their engineering journey. And although on the one hand we explicitly limit the number of flavours of each type of service, we do promise automated onboarding, provisioning, self-service and minimized cognitive load for the engineer.

These managed standardized services are accessible and orderable through our centrally available Engineers Hub. The accompanying premise is that engineers choose services higher in the stack. Therefore, we emphasize the use of higher-level managed services, which allows engineers to focus on business logic and avoid the complexities of managing the underlying infrastructure. By leveraging these services, they can build efficient and scalable solutions. The fundamental principle of managed standardized services is that these services are always up-to-date, secure, compliant, and performant. And never premium-mediocre.

Towards Engineer Happiness

This approach not only empowers our engineers and fosters service loyalty, but by stipulating clear ownership, it also reduces bureaucracy they can get involved in. Well-defined ownership clarifies responsibilities between providers and consumers of each service related to lifecycle management (LCM), service level agreements (SLAs) and roadmaps. In the end, these efforts will contribute to a positive work environment for engineers because engineers can concentrate on their core tasks: creating real value for the end-users. This is how standard services contribute to the central theme of Happy Engineers, and we believe ultimately, happy engineers are more empowered and more productive.

Conclusion

Standardization is a timeless theme. Lack of standardization is a challenge, especially in diverse in-company environments. By creating standardized services for engineers, one centralizes and simplifies what is complex and fragmented. But perhaps most importantly, the full potential and power of standardized services lies in how it positively affects engineer happiness.