How Can You Use Waypoint Today?

HashiCorp Waypoint offers a PaaS-like experience for Kubernetes, Amazon ECS, and other platforms. See 5 use cases you can try today and watch a demo.

»What is Waypoint?

Waypoint is an engine that abstracts your whole build, deploy, release process. You give it a minimal file `waypoint.hcl` that defines how your application should be deployed, and then a single "waypoint up" command can be used to deploy an application to production. Waypoint manages everything after your configuration is complete. In essence, it's giving you a build-your-own Heroku-like deployment experience for developers, and it's a tool that Platform teams are looking at closely for new and flexible self-service workflows to give to their devs.

»5 Ways to Use Waypoint Today

Saiyam Pathak — who's no stranger to developer experience with his work at Civo, a managed Kubernetes service built on k3s — gives five scenarios for possible Waypoint usage at your organization:

1 - From code to Kubernetes, fast

• Dynamic variables from K8s secrets

• Buildpacks for the build stage

• Service port and where to deploy for the deployment stage

• Ingress creation for the release stage

2 - Deploy DB auto-connected app

• Uses the database connection strings in your code

• Secret is created by SRE/Platform team and dev just needs variable

3 - Kubernetes apply plugin

• Lots of YAML files can be deployed alongside your app easily

• SRE/Platform team gives you path to YAML folder they maintain

• Pipe in artifacts from the build/push stages through variables

• Use entrypoint for logs, exec

4 - Open a shell in your current CI/CD system

• This is an option for simple pipelines or when you need to dig in manually

5 - Many-team workflow

• Minimal pressure on the developer for understanding the platform ecosystem

• Infrastructure team can write Waypoint file templates and give to devs

• SSO and HTTPS can be handled by Security team

• Developer fills in blanks and sends app into a GitOps workflow via Waypoint

You can give the developers as much or as little control as possible via templates or policies (less control for devs) or let them write their own configurations and change more things (more control for devs).

You can also use Waypoint starting with just the development environment but not in production, in case you have complex pipelines that are slow to change or heavily regulated. But Waypoint's custom pipelines feature is purpose-built to solve this.

»Demo

Watch the video below for more details on all of these points above and a demo use case showing Waypoint in action. And check out two other thought-provoking videos on Waypoint: Zero to Serverless URL in 60 seconds with Waypoint and Waypoint: The Missing Abstraction between Devs and Deployments.