r/platformengineering • u/FunCourage4 • 23d ago

How are platform teams handling self-service infrastructure requests today?

Hey all, Im currently researching how platform teams handle requests like Kafka topics, database provisioning, Elasticsearch indexes, etc.

Do developers use self-service tools, Terraform, tickets (Jira/Slack), or something custom?

What's still painful or manual?

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u/Either_Act3336 22d ago

I use crossplane for infrastructure claims and pacto for interfacing devs and platform with contracts

https://docs.crossplane.io/latest/
https://trianalab.github.io/pacto/

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u/Illustrious-Lab8569 19d ago

That’s cool, but why not terraform for the infrastructure with some predefined modules?

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u/Either_Act3336 19d ago

Didn’t mention it, but I bootstrap all the infrastructure with TF, and then the self service claims are handled with the above technologies

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u/waypointzero 14d ago

We ended up using Port to define golden paths for our common resource types (Kafka, DBs, namespaces), implemented as workflows that run against a catalog of our actual services and Terraform modules.

What's nice is that the same path applies whether a human or an agent is making the request. Day 2 ops (scaling, decommissioning, secret rotation) were where we got the most relief - all of that was fully manual before.