Link → Write Admin Tools From Day One
Can not recommend this article more! The article provides practical tips on how to manage the issue of spending more time maintaining a product than developing it. The main suggestion is to allocate time to develop administrative tools from the start, and to include supportability in the acceptance criteria or design documents. Additionally, it suggests providing non-engineering team members with useful tools such as system visibility, data modification and support actions. Furthermore, the author advises to capture an audit trail when exposing administrative tools. I think this advice can be “reused“ in a way to create an API for your application management platform. So you can provide (as a platform engineer) a consistent way of consuming application logs/deployment status/ etc. Instead of providing a bunch of different APIs like Kubernetes/Prometheus/GitLab CI.