Empowering Developers and Streamlining Operations on OpenShift

Functions and Responsibilities

Developers (Application Teams): Talented engineers building applications but have limited cloud-native and Openshift skillset.

Platform Engineering Team: This team is responsible for building and maintaining the infrastructure that supports enterprise developers. Their mission is to simplify the cloud experience for developers by abstracting the complexities of OpenShift.

Customer Success Team: A group of experienced engineers supporting the development teams. They are the bridge between the developers and the Platform Engineering team, helping to troubleshoot and resolve issues.

The Problem

As enterprise developers transition to using OpenShift, they tend to struggle with complexities. When issues arise, they often don’t know how to troubleshoot, leading to confusion and delays. The lack of clarity on whether alerts are related to application or infrastructure problems further exacerbates response times and causes inefficiencies as issues bounce between teams.

For the Platform Engineering team, this means spending a significant portion of their time supporting developers instead of focusing on innovation. The high cognitive load on developers, coupled with their unfamiliarity with existing observability tools, leads them to rely heavily on support tickets rather than solving issues independently. This situation creates a bottleneck for the Platform Team, with only a handful of experienced individuals capable of handling complex issues. Additionally, there’s a lack of cross-cluster visibility, making it difficult for the team to triage and investigate issues affecting multiple clusters. The need for the Customer Success team to have access to the CLI/control plane poses security and compliance risks, but without this access, they can’t effectively support the developers.

The Impact

• Developers experience delays and frustration due to their lack of Openshift expertise.
• The Platform Engineering team is overwhelmed with support requests, hindering their ability to innovate.
• Security and compliance risks increase as Customer Success needs access to sensitive areas.
• The absence of centralized cluster visibility complicates the management of clusters, making Platform engineering team jobs nearly impossible without significant time investment.

The Solution

In order to solve these problems, both the Platform team and the developers need a more effective tool — something that can provide a centralized view of all OpenShift clusters, streamline troubleshooting, and empower developers to resolve issues on their own.

Robusta offers exactly what they need:

Centralized Cluster Visibility: Platform engineers can now monitor the health of hundreds of OpenShift clusters in a single dashboard, eliminating the need to juggle dozens of windows.

Empowered Developer: With Robusta, developers gain the ability to troubleshoot issues themselves, reducing their reliance on the Customer Success team.

Reduced Cognitive Load: The Platform Engineering team can focus on innovation rather than constant firefighting, as Robusta automates much of the investigation and alerting process.

Enhanced Security: By reducing the need for Customer Success to access the CLI/control plane, Robusta mitigates security and compliance risks.

The Outcome

With Robusta in place, the Platform team can scale their operations more effectively, freeing up time for innovation and strategic initiatives. Developers are more self-sufficient, leading to faster resolution times (MTTR) and improved overall productivity.  The Customer Success team can focus on creating valuable resources like documentation and FAQs, further reducing the volume of support tickets.

With Robusta the team has the tools and visibility they need to ensure that the platform is reliable, secure, and optimized for the needs of the entire organization.