Define and Standardize: How automation allows traditional and citizen developers to work in concert

March 14, 2023 by Kilian Carroll, Product Marketing @ Fathym

In today's fast-paced world, enterprises require solutions to be delivered quickly and efficiently. This “need for speed” has led to the rise of citizen developers - non-technical professionals who can create and maintain applications without traditional development experience. However, to enable citizen developers and traditional developers to work together, it's crucial to automate core aspects of the development flow.

Automation is essential for enterprises looking to deliver solutions quickly and efficiently. It helps reduce errors, speed up processes and ultimately leads to better results. With the rise of citizen developers, it's more important than ever to define and standardize core aspects of the development process through automation.

Let’s explore three ways Fathym offers automation:

“Out-of-the-box" Azure cloud
DevOps workflow
Automated application launch pads

Enterprise-ready cloud

Fathym provisions an out-of-the-box, best practise Azure cloud that can be deployed to a user’s Azure subscription through a few CLI commands. Users can get started deploying and hosting applications in Fathym’s shared environment and can easily deploy everything to their own Azure when ready.

This allows individuals or organizations without Azure experience to deploy and host applications in an Azure cloud without having to set it up themselves. For organizations that already have an Azure subscription, Fathym’s platform can be deployed into it. This enables them to take advantage of Fathym’s tooling (application composition, deployment, hosting, identity management and more) but consolidated as part of their existing Azure cloud footprint.

In this way, Fathym is lowering the bar for what’s needed to start launching cloud-native apps on Azure, whether for traditional or citizen developers. While Fathym automates a best practice Azure cloud, as this cloud is deployed to a user or organization’s own Azure, their developers maintain complete control, access and ability to dictate future development plans.

Automated DevOps starting point

One of the most critical areas for enterprises to automate is DevOps processes. DevOps is the practice of combining development and operations to create a streamlined process for software delivery. By automating the DevOps process, organizations can reduce the time it takes to develop and deploy new applications, while also improving the quality of those applications.

Fathym provides end-to-end DevOps automation that includes automated testing, deployment and monitoring. It is a thoughtful and opinionated CI/CD workflow that leverages GitHub Actions and allows traditional and citizen developers to rapidly deliver applications together without vendor lock-in. Fathym operates as a virtual developer, setting up repositories, standard configurations and permissions for GitHub repositories, npm packages and GitHub Actions as if you hired a developer to set it up for you.

Under the hood, Fathym gives you the flexibility to customize how and where your app is modified and deployed. Think of Fathym like an iceberg - the surface represents the out-of-the-box starting points of the platform, but there are many customization options available below the surface. You maintain full control for customizing your DevOps workflow and selecting a different source control or build pipeline provider.

With automated DevOps workflows, citizen developers can deploy applications without worrying about breaking production environments. Meanwhile, traditional developers can focus on more complex development tasks, secure in the knowledge that the applications committed by citizen developers are subject to best practice automation.

Automated application launch pads

At its core, Fathym is a platform that allows both traditional and citizen developers to efficiently craft solutions by combining custom, open-source or third-party software components.

One way that Fathym facilitates this is through automated launch pads for high value or common application use cases. Developers can package full-stack automations that drastically reduce the steps required to get a production-ready application up and running.

These automations can contain:

Frontend starter templates
UI component packs
Hosted backend instances (containers, servers etc.) of web-based tools such as a CMS, DAM, database, and more.
API reverse proxies to connect frontend and backend
SPA proxies that host the UI of backend instances

Instead of setting all of this up manually, developers can use Fathym to package it as automations that can be launched with a few simple CLI commands.

These automated launch pads could be for common internal use cases, allowing traditional developers to define and standardize development for more junior developers or citizen developers. Or launch pads can be created for application use cases that make it much easier for an organization’s customers or partners to get up and running with their products.

With Fathym, all the steps involved in getting full applications up and running can be automated. Developers and citizen developers can then just focus on producing custom and delightful user experiences, whether with JavaScript frameworks or no-code tools. Or both.