project-proposal-2025
CODEpendent
Abstract
A common challenge software engineering teams face when scaling to an enterprise-level organisation is inefficiency. This can manifest in various ways, including fragmented tooling, inconsistent processes, and resource wastage, all of which drive up costs and operational complexity. CODEpendent is an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) designed to enable self-service with guardrails, allowing engineers to efficiently manage source control, provision infrastructure, deploy applications, and monitor diagnostics - all within a cohesive ecosystem. The platform supports organisations struggling to manage multiple microservices across different products, environments, and regions. By integrating seamlessly with existing tools, CODEpendent enhances deployability, security, and reliability, reducing friction in the development lifecycle. With CODEpendent, engineering teams can shift their focus to delivering high-quality software rather than battling the complexities of tools and infrastructure.
Author
Name: Mitch Manning
Student number: 45321265
Functionality
CODEpendent supports software engineers from the very start of a new project, accelerating their time-to-business value. It achieves this by providing the following functionality:
1. Microservice Lifecycle Management
CODEpendent enables engineers to provision all the necessary resources for a new project through a streamlined process. This is achieved by generating a new repository from a pre-approved API template, designed to meet compliance and company regulations. Engineers can customise the configuration to include or exclude specific components as needed. Once finalised, a new repository is created, containing a sample API, required infrastructure, and pre-configured workflows. By the time the engineer is ready to clone the repository, the project’s infrastructure and code have already been deployed.
2. Continuous Development and Deployment
With the new repository in place, engineers can focus on delivering high-quality software. While code changes and approvals remain managed within the source control system, CODEpendent simplifies infrastructure management and deployments. Additionally, the platform empowers engineers to seamlessly promote or rollback deployed software changes.
3. Monitoring and Diagnostics
Deployed software can be monitored directly within CODEpendent, which provides a unified dashboard for logging, diagnostics, and performance metrics. With built-in support for alert integrations, CODEpendent enables proactive issue detection and resolution, ensuring system reliability and performance.
4. Ongoing Management
CODEpendent acts as a unified control plane for all downstream tools. Engineers can centrally modify workflows and infrastructure templates across active projects, keeping them aligned with best practices. The platform allows for interchangeable tooling, maintaining a consistent developer experience even when switching CI/CD or infrastructure providers. With centralised governance and compliance enforcement, CODEpendent standardises DevOps processes, ensuring operational consistency at scale.
Scope
The following outlines the key functionalities required to deliver a Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
1. Microservice Lifecycle Management
Create a New Microservice
- Automate the creation of microservices by generating a new repository from a standardised API template.
- Include predefined sample code, infrastructure-as-code (IaC) artifacts, and CI/CD workflow configurations.
Delete an Existing Microservice
- Implement a controlled decommissioning process that:
- Tears down all associated infrastructure resources (e.g. compute, storage, networking).
- Archives the repository to preserve historical data while preventing further modifications.
- Removes application-related metadata from the platform.
2. Continuous Development and Deployment
Release Management
- Provide a self-service interface for engineers to manage deployments, including:
- Promoting releases across environments (e.g. dev -> staging -> production).
- Rolling back to a previous stable version if issues arise.
3. Monitoring and Diagnostics
Microservice Health Monitoring
- Develop a centralised dashboard to track the health of deployed microservices.
4. Ongoing Management
Developer Portal
- Create a developer portal that houses all outlined functionalities, including microservice creation, release management and monitoring.
- Provide authentication and authorisation mechanisms to restrict application access to approved users.
Quality Attributes
The success of CODEpendent relies on key quality attributes to ensure the platform is reliable, adoptable and easy to use.
1. Deployability
In the context of CODEpendent, deployability ensures that the platform’s infrastructure (as well as the infrastructure for all software it provisions) can be easily created, updated, and removed. The platform is designed to empower engineers to quickly set up and manage their microservices with minimal hassle or downtime. High deployability will streamline the development lifecycle, reduce the time to provision new infrastructure and increase the success rate of deployments.
2. Security
Security is critical for CODEpendent, ensuring that sensitive data, infrastructure, and applications remain protected. The platform must enforce robust authentication, authorisation, and access control mechanisms to prevent unauthorised usage. Security can be measured by tracking authentication success rates, access control violations, and vulnerability assessments across the platform.
3. Reliability
Given the platform is intended to accelerate engineering productivity, CODEpendent is required to be reliable and adoptable. The platform must perform consistently under expected workloads, handle failures gracefully and support self-healing where applicable. Reliability can be measured by uptime percentages, mean time to recovery (MTTR), and the success rate of automated failover processes.
Evaluation
The evaluation of CODEpendent will be based on measurable criteria to ensure the platform meets its intended functionality and quality attributes.
Scope
- Create a New Microservice: Measure the time required to generate a new repository, provision infrastructure, and deploy an initial service. The goal is to complete this process within 10 minutes. Success can be tracked by aggregating the results of workflow execution times.
- Delete an Existing Microservice: Assess the success rate of the decommissioning process, including infrastructure teardown and repository archiving. The goal is a 100% success rate, verified through logs confirming resource removal and restricted repository access.
- Release Management: Evaluate the efficiency of promoting and rolling back deployments. The goal is for engineers to complete a deployment within 5 minutes with a 100% success rate. Measured by tracking deployment pipeline execution times and success frequency.
- Microservice Health Monitoring: Ensure all deployed microservices have health monitoring enabled. The goal is 100% visibility on request, where application specific diagnostic tests are visible. Measured upon inspection of the dashboard.
- Developer Portal: Assess usability by measuring the time required for engineers to complete key tasks, such as creating a service, managing deployments, or accessing diagnostics. The goal is for all common actions to be completed within 5 minutes. Evaluated through user session tracking and task completion times.
Quality Attributes
- Deployability: Measure the time required to provision infrastructure and deploy software successfully. The goal is for an end-to-end pipeline to not exceed 10 minutes. This can be captured by averaging the durations of repeated workflow runs.
- Security: Assess the effectiveness of authentication, authorisation, and access controls. The goal is to maintain 100% compliance with security policies and prevent unauthorised access. This can be measured by tracking authentication success rates and results from policy defined vulnerability scans.
- Reliability: Measure system uptime and the ability to recover from failures. The goal is to maintain 95%+ uptime and minimise mean time to recovery (MTTR) in the event of failures. This can be evaluated by monitoring downtime occurrences and duration.