OpsLevel and The Need for a Developer Portal with Kenneth Rose

Kenneth Rose, CTO at OpsLevel, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss how OpsLevel is helping developer teams to scale effectively. Kenneth reveals what a developer portal is, how he thinks about the functionality of a developer portal, and the problems a developer portal solves for large developer teams. Corey and Kenneth discuss how to drive adoption of a developer portal, and Kenneth explains why it’s so necessary to have executive buy-in throughout that process. Kenneth also discusses how using their own portal internally along with seeking out customer feedback has allowed OpsLevel to make impactful innovations.
About KenKenneth (Ken) Rose is the CTO and Co-Founder of OpsLevel. Ken has spent over 15 years scaling engineering teams as an early engineer at PagerDuty and Shopify. Having in-the-trenches experience has allowed Ken a unique perspective on how some of the best teams are built and scaled and lends this viewpoint to building products for OpsLevel, a service ownership platform built to turn chaos into consistency for engineering leaders.
Links Referenced: OpsLevel: https://www.opslevel.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/opslevel/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/OpsLevelHQ
Transcript

Announcer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.

Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, I’m Corey Quinn, about, oh I don’t know, two years ago and change, I wound up writing a blog post titled, “Developer Portals are An Anti Pattern,” and I haven’t really spent a lot of time thinking about them since. This promoted guest episode is brought to us by our friends at OpsLevel, and they have sent their CTO and co-founder Ken Rose, presumably in an attempt to change my perspective on these things. Let’s find out. Ken, thank you for agreeing to, well, run the gauntlet, for lack of a better term.

Ken: Hey, Corey. Thanks again for having me. And I’ve heard, you know, heard and listened to your show a bunch, and really excited to be here today.

Corey: Let’s begin with defining our terms. I’m curious to know what a developer portal is. ‘What would you say a developer portal means to you?’ Like it’s a college entrance essay.

Ken: Right? Definitely. You know, so really, a developer portal is this consolidated place for developers to come to, especially in large organizations to be able to get their jobs done more easily, right? A large challenge that developers have in large organizations, there’s just a lot to do and a lot to take care of. So, a developer portal is a place for developers to be able to better own, manage, and run the services, they’re responsible for that run in production, and they can do that through access, easy access to self-service tooling.

Corey: I guess, on some level, this turns into one of those alignment charts of, like, what is a database and, like, how prescriptive you want to be. It’s like, well is a senior engineer a database because you can query them and they have information? Would you consider, for example, Kubernetes be a developer platform, and/or would the AWS console?

Ken: Yeah, that’s actually an interesting question, right? So, I think there’s actually two—we’re going to get really niggly h