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.