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# platform-toolbox
s
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d
doing some internal evaluation and would love to hear your experiences with either tool
a
I have done some playing with port but not Cortex. What are you trying to achieve or find out?
d
partly a bakeoff I'm seeing port as being unopinionated, wondering if that gets too unwieldy / too much to handle and or maintain. it is push based. cortex has a much more opinionated approach, it's more pull based with the exception of k8s
j
Would also be interested in hearing more about this. I've been leaning towards Port due what appears to be more flexibility.
a
cortex has a much more opinionated approach, it's more pull based with the exception of k8s
That seems so backwards to me 🙈😅 k8s is one big declare and converge system which is built for pull based!
As for flexibility, I figure with any SaaS I have to buy into their product vision as it is inherently going to be a limited/surface area. That being said it gives the benefit of structure and often quicker starts. But given I haven't used both it's hard to have an opinion on a comparison.
As for my port experience. I found the initial quick start really easy and great but then the attempt to test what day 2 would look like a bit harder. For example removing items or updating a fleet of the same item (10s blueprints needing an upgrade) was a faff, understanding the estate of actions I had (which for me was the biggest challenge as that's where all the tricky logic lives) was not intuitive, there were some design decisions where users needed more info about the actions than I want them to (e.g. a namespaces action requires users to know that and pick one despite me having the knowledge to abstract that from them). I also found it very clicky. They have an API but I never sussed how to do declarative setup of port. Plus their API seems to be limited to admin setup of port and doesn't include API request by users (e.g. for use in a CI/CD pipeline or something). I know they are moving quick so some of this may be out of date. But hopefully it's helpful!
e
We've evaluated various tools and chose Port for our next IDP. The main reason is its flexibility to create the workflows our developers needs, that play well with our way of work. It gives us the room to configure and customize the tool. We find the push model secured since we can not have inbound networking connection for 3rd party tools
d
We’ve analyzed several solutions, tries things out, but ended up with getport.io because of the possibility to define your own flows, decide where you want your runtime and free objects structure. We use it as an single source of truth and one place for foundation, environments and ALM management, if you aim towards modern IDP and ready to rename infrastructure team to platform and focus on developer’s experience - port is the way to go 👀
k
@dylan I have used Port and it is both Pull and push based. Up to you. They just released their "Ocean framework" that you should check. I have briefly looked at Cortex and it seems very constrained to me (compared to Port). Also see Viktor Farcic's videos for dev portal/platform engineering series. (DevOps toolkit channel) if you haven't seen them already.
a
☝️ that Viktor video is what got me looking at port!
r
Just FYI OpsLevel has significant advantages when it comes to gaining data quality/coverage and adoption on your IDP. (Disclaimer i work at OpsLevel)
m
Have someone any you can host by your self ? Did see cortex hade a helm but have any test it ?
a
If you're looking for an orchestrator Kratix is self hosted. If you're looking for a UI portal we've been mostly using backstage with our self hosted customers
m
Cool thanks will have a look
a
Any questions shout. We're actively working with early adopters to make sure they get what they need from our roadmap 🙌
m
Yee cool I think I will
Let me look at some helm and then a ping you :-)
d
just wanted to say thank you all for the responses! this feedback is helpful for our evaluation some folks at Cortex gave us anecdotes of customers going down too deep down the rabbithole with port's customizability, I'm taking that with a grain of salt because it's their competitor 🙄, but if there's merit in that I'd love to hear from any users who have it live in production
j
Unbiased reviews seem hard to come by what with this being the "year of platform engineering" 😜
s
Hey Dylan 🙌 After extensive research in the Portals market, I chose Port, and I am really happy with this decision. The setup was very easy (defining the Blueprints and exporting data from AWS), and now we are focusing on the Self-Service Hub, which is amazing. Feel free to reach out to me if you need any assistance. 🙂
a
Can’t tell that I did extensive research on the matter, but went for port. Think of it as structured DB with relations+UI+structured Actions to create/delete DB records on it, and actions to run on existing records. Underlying logic of actions - is your backend This gives good flexibility both to describe cross-clouds/internal infrastructure and provide users/dev common entry point to do what they need I’d even add - dont get distracted by existing integrations(while they can be nice). They are merely use of API, and what really matters what lower level consists of. Having TF provider and API allows to do what you actually need, regardless of whether integration exists or not Column/Row/Action/View permission model also gives good flexibility on what should be exposed to whome
y
We're currently in the process of implementing Port in our R&D. We tested most popular developer portals and found Port to be the most flexible and non-opinionated, plus the integration was super smooth. The biggest issue we've seen with popular projects like Backstage was having to drastically change our way of doing things which wasn't something we wanted to do just for the sake of implementing it. So far we're very happy with our choice!
m
@Arthur Hemon
l
Hey folks, late to the party here but we've been curating a detailed features/requirements matrix across 18 solutions for 4-5 months now. We haven't added Cortex yet, but will soon. Recorded a quick Loom for this: https://www.loom.com/share/ca2a7824ad414843a7e2af1892641370?sid=7bacf754-d89b-406c-a07a-350ff873a7b2 If there's any other tool you think we should add, or features/requirements to add, please let me know. P.S.: Happy to get any of you a hefty discount if you want the full report
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