Engineers keep everything running. Whether it’s a platform, software, CI/CD pipeline, or anything else besides, if it’s part of your systems it requires an engineer. From initial implementation and deployment to business-as-usual (BAU) systems operation, engineers are an indispensable resource in any organization.
However, herein is the problem. Everything an engineer does is essential, but also incredibly time-consuming. What’s more, the most time-consuming parts of an engineer’s working week are the management and upkeep of existing systems.
Most engineers didn’t learn to code so they could perform the same repetitive BAU tasks. They want to apply their skills to creative areas, implementing new components and optimizing existing processes to test their skills and maximize the value of the systems they maintain. There are only so many hours in a week, and these uncreative tasks engineers spend most of their time on removes that all-important “slack time” and hampers their creativity.
But what if it didn’t have to be this way?
Low-code platforms like Kaholo are creating time for engineers across the world to work on what they’re passionate about. We enable declarative operations to become reality, freeing engineers from endless reworks and wheel reinvention to invest their efforts in projects that yield growth and new value.
Engineering: Where does the time go?
Any engineer will gladly tell you how few hours there are in the day. If there’s a word you can use to describe every engineer’s schedule, it’s ‘busy’.
The reasons for this aren’t some closely guarded industry secret. With every year that passes, more and more processes and areas of business become dependent on IT. What’s more, the IT they rely on becomes increasingly integrated and complex with each calendar month.
As business-redefining as technology is, somebody has to make sure it’s always working as intended. If your entire sales floor (for example) relies on VPN access, losing that access costs dollars-on-the-minute.
In the simplest terms, the more businesses rely on their IT, the more time engineers have to spend ‘keeping the lights on. Management and maintenance are the names of the game for most engineers, and every new pipeline, toolchain, and component added to a system creates more hours they need to spend playing it.
Toolchains
Organizations are relying on 10+ toolchains on average. The bulk of these are for code management, development, and review, with performance monitoring and testing being the other most common toolchain uses.
While these toolchains all add incredible value, they also create resource needs as soon as they’re deployed. Over 3 in 10 DevOps engineers surveyed in 2020 reported that too many manual processes slowed down progress.
Toolchain management is where much of the time lost on manual processes is spent. For end-to-end development to go smoothly, every plugin and tool in the toolchain must be observable and correctly integrated. One failure could set delivery back weeks, or even months.
This means that each toolchain requires regular manual code input and configuration to remain operational. When most engineers are working with multiple chains, each containing potentially dozens of tools and plugins, hours end up getting spent on tweaking and adjusting code so critical toolchains don’t cause more delays than they were deployed to resolve in the first place.
Existing Automation Pipelines
It’s irrefutable that automation saves an almost inconceivably large amount of time. CI/CD, for example, cuts development timeframes by 20%. The global DevOps market is expected to reach over $17 billion in value by 2026. The value automation brings to businesses makes it easy to understand why.
However, there is no way to automate automation. From deployment to BAU maintenance, automation pipelines create extensive labor and time requirements for engineers. For every hour your automation pipeline saves your dev and testing teams thanks to CI/CD, it creates an hour of needed input from your DevOps resources.
This is an incredibly rough estimation, but the point stands. Ensuring pipelines are intact is one of the most time-consuming daily tasks for engineers. There are always a potentially infinite number of processes running, problems to fix and troubleshoot, and essential analysis to be carried out. Almost all of this requires extensive manual input.
Everything from task scheduling and workflow management, to individual code fixes and debugging, require an engineer to shift their focus from value-adding innovative tasks to an existing pipeline. With automation pipelines penetrating the technical ecosystem ever deeper with each passing year, this need is only going to increase.
BAU Operations
Automation pipelines and toolchains stem from the basic purpose of IT and DevOps engineering; ensuring BAU operations are as optimized and obstacle-free as possible.
Engineers are passionate about their work on a personal level. From a business perspective though, the field exists outside of the realms of ‘hobby’ exclusively because it revolutionized both the scale and efficiency they could operate at effectively.
Therein lies the unspoken tension in engineering. While every engineer loves the challenge of troubleshooting and debugging a sticky or unanticipated error, none of them get motivated by the thought of manually reviewing hundreds of lines of log data, for example.
BAU Operations are always going to be a #1 priority for engineers. Ultimately, the value they add to BAU operations is the sole reason they’re employed. However, keeping to this commitment doesn’t have to be the extensive time and labor sinkhole it is for many of them.
Too many hours, too few engineers
As you can see, the number of engineering hours required is always increasing. This is a key factor in the high levels of burnout and turnover. Recent surveys of engineers and other IT/tech professionals have shown levels of exhaustion from overworking are as high as 54%.
It’s no secret this quickly leads to high staff turnover. It’s not an issue that businesses can ignore, and thankfully very few do. Regardless of how ineffective some solutions might be (the limpness of the consolidatory office pizza-night is a running joke amongst white-collar workers by 2021), you’d be hard-pressed to find a business that actively ignored workload stress amongst staff.
Engineering, and other IT teams, present a unique challenge for businesses in this arena. With a sales team, if there are too many clients to manage or leads to chase the solution is to hire new salespeople. If a new campaign is pushing your marketing team to overtime breaking point, bolstering their ranks solves the problem. With engineers, it isn’t so simple.
Engineering hours: An expensive resource
One of the reasons nearly 3 in 10 engineers and technologists feel overworked is that businesses are reluctant to increase the number of them on the payroll unless it’s absolutely necessary. Unfortunately, what the engineers on the ground define as ‘absolutely necessary’ and what those on the board do are very different.
Engineers are a proud bunch, and they like to rise to a challenge. As such, many end up bending over backward and pushing themselves to the breaking point. For these engineers, hiring in an extra pair of hands is absolutely necessary. But from the board’s perspective, the lights are still on, so they can hold off for another quarter.
Why do boardrooms and business owners tend to take this stance? Because engineering hours are expensive. The average salary of a DevOps engineer in the US is $103k per year. For comparison, the average sales rep is a $65k yearly investment, with marketing at less than $45k.
The traditional method of using hiring to create more labor hours doesn’t apply. Your engineers may find their workload untenable, but investing $100k+ to meet those shortfalls could null the ROI of having an engineering team in the first place (especially for a small business).
Optimize Engineering with Automation
Mismanagement of engineering resources is a problem that needs solving, and the solution isn’t simply to hire more engineers. Doing so is ineffective from a cost standpoint, and doesn’t address the root cause of the imbalance (too much manual input needed for existing processes).
At Kaholo, we solved the problem by approaching it from the opposite direction. Rather than increasing the number of engineering hours available, we’ve optimized and revolutionized the ones you already have.
How? By creating an intuitive low-code platform that reduces or removes the manual tasks which led to engineering efforts being a stretched and scarce resource in the first place.
The low-code engineering revolution
Kaholo utilizes low-code tooling to remove much of the manual code input, task and schedule management, and troubleshooting analysis that keep engineers away from more creative, value-adding endeavors.
The platform environment manages your pipelines with an intuitive drag-and-drop visualization.
Automation workflows, for example, can be managed from a single pane so you have complete visibility throughout. Rather than having to manually track, configure, and code complex workflows, your entire automation ecosystem is maintained and configured with a single-window drag and drop interface.
Drag and drop scheduling across your entire automation ecosystem
Scheduling becomes a simple, at-a-glance task that can be effectively implemented with a few clicks via an integrated scheduler. Regular builds, backups, and cron jobs can be scheduled across your ecosystem with a single calendar.
For in-depth analysis, the automation dashboard displays all processes in a single pane. Engineers can get an overview of the status of every process running, completed, and scheduled. In-depth analytics provide further info in a few clicks, such as insight into process triggers and host machine status. Rather than monitoring and managing each pipeline individually, engineers utilizing the Kaholo platform can wrangle and control all pipelines from a single interface.
Free your engineers from wasted toil
For many of our customers, the biggest time-saving features of the Kaholo platform are those that allow them to manage BAU operations without having to endlessly rework code.
The Kaholo platform provides drag-and-drop low-code environments for policy enforcement and management. Authentication and authorization, a key resource drain usually, can be managed across all tools and resources from a single location, including defining RBAC.
A final major benefit in terms of engineering resource optimization is the Kaholo platform’s broad compatibility range. An extensive list of DevOps and dev tools and environments have plugins within Kaholo, meaning that integrating new tools and features to existing toolchains becomes a much simpler and less time-consuming task.
These are just some of the many reasons that Kaholo’s low-code platform stops engineering effort wastage. By significantly reducing manual work of pipelines, toolchains, and operations, Kaholo frees engineers to complete the innovative tasks that bring them joy and your business value.
