Humanitec AWS Reference Architecture

TL;DR

Skip the theory? Go here to spin up your Humanitec AWS Reference Architecture Implementation.

Follow this learning path to master your Internal Developer Platform.

Building an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) can come with many challenges. To give you a head start, we’ve created a set of reference architectures based on hundreds of real-world setups. These architectures described in code provide a starting point to build your own IDP within minutes, along with customization capabilities to ensure your platform meets the unique needs of your users (developers).

The initial version of this reference architecture has been presented by Mike Gatto, Sr. DevOps Engineer, McKinsey and Stephan Schneider, Digital Expert Associate Partner, McKinsey at PlartformCon 2023.

What is an Internal Developer Platform (IDP)?

An Internal Developer Platform (IDP) is the sum of all the tech and tools that a platform engineering team binds together to pave golden paths for developers. IDPs lower cognitive load across the engineering organization and enable developer self-service, without abstracting away context from developers or making the underlying tech inaccessible. Well-designed IDPs follow a Platform as a Product approach, where a platform team builds, maintains, and continuously improves the IDP, following product management principles and best practices.

Understanding the different planes of the IDP reference architecture

When McKinsey originally published the reference architecture they proposed five planes that describe the different parts of a modern Internal Developer Platform (IDP).

Developer Control Plane

This plane is the primary configuration layer and interaction point for the platform users. It harbors the following components:

• A Version Control System. GitHub is a prominent example, but this can be any system that contains two types of repositories:
  • Application Source Code
  • Platform Source Code, e.g. using Terraform
• Workload specifications. The reference architecture uses Score.
• A portal for developers to interact with. It can be the Humanitec Portal, but you might also use Backstage or any other portal on the market.

Integration and Delivery Plane

This plane is about building and storing the image, creating app and infra configs from the abstractions provided by the developers, and deploying the final state. It’s where the domains of developers and platform engineers meet.

This plane usually contains four different tools:

• A CI pipeline. It can be Github Actions or any CI tooling on the market.
• The image registry holding your container images. Again, this can be any registry on the market.
• An orchestrator which in our example, is the Humanitec Platform Orchestrator.
• The CD system, which can be the Platform Orchestrator’s deployment pipeline capabilities — an external system triggered by the Orchestrator using a webhook, or a setup in tandem with GitOps operators like ArgoCD.

Monitoring and Logging Plane

The integration of monitoring and logging systems varies greatly depending on the system. This plane however is not a focus of the reference architecture.

Security Plane

The security plane of the reference architecture is focused on the secrets management system. The secrets manager stores configuration information such as database passwords, API keys, or TLS certificates needed by an Application at runtime. It allows the Platform Orchestrator to reference the secrets and inject them into the Workloads dynamically. You can learn more about secrets management and integration with other secrets management here.

The reference architecture sample implementations use the secrets store attached to the Humanitec SaaS system.

Resource Plane

This plane is where the actual infrastructure exists including clusters, databases, storage, or DNS services. The configuration of the Resources is managed by the Platform Orchestrator which dynamically creates app and infrastructure configurations with every deployment and creates, updates, or deletes dependent Resources as required.

How to spin up your Humanitec AWS Reference Architecture

This repo contains an implementation of part of the Humanitec Reference Architecture for an Internal Developer Platform.

To install an implementation containing add-ons, follow the separate README. We currently feature these add-ons:

• Base layer plus Backstage

This repo covers the base layer of the implementation for AWS.

By default, the following will be provisioned:

• VPC
• EKS Cluster
• IAM User to access the cluster
• Ingress NGINX in the cluster
• Resource Definitions in Humanitec for:
  • Kubernetes Cluster

Prerequisites

• A Humanitec account with the Administrator role in an Organization. Get a free trial if you are just starting.
• An AWS account
• AWS CLI installed locally
• terraform installed locally

Usage

Note: Using this Reference Architecture Implementation will incur costs for your AWS project.

It is recommended that you fully review the code before you run it to ensure you understand the impact of provisioning this infrastructure. Humanitec does not take responsibility for any costs incurred or damage caused when using the Reference Architecture Implementation.

This reference architecture implementation uses Terraform. You will need to do the following:

1. Fork this GitHub repo, clone it to your local machine and navigate to the root of the repository.

2. Set the required input variables. (see Required input variables)

3. Ensure you are logged in with aws. (Follow the quickstart if you aren't)

4. Set the HUMANITEC_TOKEN environment variable to an appropriate Humanitec API token with the Administrator role on the Humanitec Organization.

   For example:

   export HUMANITEC_TOKEN="my-humanitec-api-token"
   

5. Run terraform:

   terraform init
   terraform plan
   terraform apply
   

Required input variables

Terraform reads variables by default from a file called terraform.tfvars. You can create your own file by renaming the terraform.tfvars.example file in the root of the repo and then filling in the missing values.

You can see find a details about each of those variables and additional supported variables under Inputs.

Verify your result

Check for the existence of key elements of the reference architecture. This is a subset of all elements only. For a complete list of what was installed, review the Terraform code.

1. Set the HUMANITEC_ORG environment variable to the ID of your Humanitec Organization (must be all lowercase):

   export HUMANITEC_ORG="my-humanitec-org"
   

2. Verify the existence of the Resource Definition for the EKS cluster in your Humanitec Organization:

   curl -s https://api.humanitec.io/orgs/${HUMANITEC_ORG}/resources/defs/ref-arch \
     --header "Authorization: Bearer ${HUMANITEC_TOKEN}" \
     | jq .id,.type
   

   This should output:

   "ref-arch"
   "k8s-cluster"
   

3. Verify the existence of the newly created EKS cluster:

   aws eks list-clusters --region <your-region>
   

   This should output:

   {
       "clusters": [
           "ref-arch",
           "[more previously existing clusters here]"
       ]
   }
   

Cleaning up

Once you are finished with the reference architecture, you can remove all provisioned infrastructure and the resource definitions created in Humanitec with the following:

1. Ensure you are (still) logged in with aws.

2. Ensure you still have the HUMANITEC_TOKEN environment variable set to an appropriate Humanitec API token with the Administrator role on the Humanitec Organization.

3. Run terraform:

   terraform destroy
   

Terraform docs

Requirements

Name	Version
terraform	>= 1.3.0
aws	~> 5.17
humanitec	~> 1.0

Modules

Name	Source	Version
base	./modules/base	n/a

Inputs

Name	Description	Type	Default	Required
aws_account_id	AWS Account (ID) to use	string	n/a	yes
aws_region	AWS Region to deploy into	string	n/a	yes
humanitec_org_id	Humanitec Organization ID	string	n/a	yes
disk_size	Disk size in GB to use for EKS nodes	number	20	no
instance_types	List of EC2 instances types to use for EKS nodes	list(string)	[ "t3.large" ]	no

Learn more

Expand your knowledge by heading over to our learning path, and discover how to:

• Deploy the Humanitec reference architecture using a cloud provider of your choice
• Deploy and manage Applications using the Humanitec Platform Orchestrator and Score
• Provision additional Resources and connect to them
• Achieve standardization by design
• Deal with special scenarios

Master your Internal Developer Platform

• Introduction
• Design principles
• Structure and integration points
• Dynamic Configuration Management
• Tutorial: Set up the reference architecture in your cloud
• Theory on developer workflows
• Tutorial: Scaffold a new Workload and create staging and prod Environments
• Tutorial: Deploy an Amazon S3 Resource to production
• Tutorial: Perform daily developer activities (debug, rollback, diffs, logs)
• Tutorial: Deploy ephemeral Environments
• Theory on platform engineering workflows
• Resource management theory
• Tutorial: Provision a Redis cluster on AWS using Terraform
• Tutorial: Update Resource Definitions for related Applications