Smarter Week

How to automate it

How to automate “spin up environments and handle infra requests from developers”

Here is the best way to spend less time on this, best first. Each comes with steps you can follow today.

30 min
typically, every day
60%
of the time can be automated
A small project
to set up

Fix 1 of 1

Automation

Give developers self-service templates for environments and common requests

Templates in an internal developer portal or preview environments on every PR remove most "can you spin up X" requests to the platform team.

Typically saves about 50% of the time16 h to set up
  1. 1List the most common infra requests from the last quarter.
  2. 2Turn the top ones into templates in Backstage, Port or Cortex, backed by Terraform modules.
  3. 3Turn on preview environments per pull request where your stack supports it (Vercel, Netlify, Render or Kubernetes namespaces).
  4. 4Point requests to the portal and track what is still asked by hand.

Tools: Backstage · Port · Cortex · Terraform modules · Vercel or Render previews

Who does this task

Roles in our library that list this as one of their common tasks. Each guide covers the rest of that role’s week.

DevOps / Site reliability engineer

HourLeak · the 8-minute work audit

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