Port
Unified portal has standardized cloud landing zones and streamlined day two operations
What is our primary use case?
A specific example of how I use Port for building landing zones or products is that we can build easily any cloud landing zone in Azure, AWS, or GCP. We can do day two operations such as building networks, setting up permissions, and so on. We have full visibility in the portal as a software catalog.
What is most valuable?
Port sets up the golden path and guardrails for developers by allowing you to define a standardized way of doing common engineering tasks. You can ingest some security checks, implement standard workflows with approved cloud resources, and set up policies to constrain what can be used in which environment. Port also offers integrations with other systems such as GitHub and allows you to approve specific Terraform modules, for example. Approvals are also available.
Port has impacted my organization positively by helping establish a standard way of doing things without having to cater for each development team separately. As a team that develops infrastructure, it is positive because I do not have to follow many different processes for clouds, deployments, or other tasks. Instead, I have this single stop of a software catalog that tells me what is available. I can click through it, get my infrastructure provisioned, and deploy the products.
While I do not have any measurements, I can safely say that the time saved is enormous because you do not have to look at different parts in the organization and spend time finding who does what or where to get something provisioned. Instead, it is a single portal where you can do pretty much everything.
What needs improvement?
I would find it interesting to see some kind of migration plans for Port, including support for migrations that it could automate, such as moving from other systems or directly migrating cloud resources to Port.
For how long have I used the solution?
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
How are customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
What was our ROI?
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
What other advice do I have?
I have not used Port's AI capabilities, so I cannot provide any thoughts on the accuracy and reliability of its output.
My advice to others looking into using Port is that you should go for it; it is a great product. I would rate this review a 9.
Great IDP
I like the tool, we're just scratching the surface.
Elegant self-service portal offering various features to make life easier
Scalability – Works well with adapting to business growth.
Performance – Stable and responsive, with minimal downtime.
Integration - supports various integrations + possibility to use not existing via webhooks, etc
Learning curve - During initial phase harder to get concept and learn terms with their usage
review from system engineer perspective
REST API latency is poor.
Easy to use and to integrate with AWS
Easy to integrate with AWS
User friendly
Portal for Modern Engineering Teams
What I love most is how easy it is to make Port work for our needs - you can add your own integrations if you need to, plus there are lots of ready-made ones from both Port and the community.
The interface is super easy to use, and you can set it up so different team members see exactly what they need without getting overwhelmed. It's really helped our team work better together.
Observability and Ownership: Monitor and understand the performance, health, and behavior of services to ensure reliability and availability.
Scorecard: Measure and track system performance to understand and prioritize areas for improvement.
Developer Experience and Self-Service: Improve developer productivity by providing efficient tools and resources for managing workflows and resources.
Port is Flexible and Easy to Integrate
The service itself is very good, but it might require some more time to mature.
- It joins catalog with self-service.
- Support is fast
- User interface is simple
- Some key features still missing
- Not enough managed integrations (have to install some exporters)
- Some user interface actions are not self intuitive (might cause data loss when not expected)
- No native version control integration (e.g. Git file changes)
- No managed self-service inte4grations (e.g. Helm is one of the most common standards used to install applications, self-service actions could be automatically created based on Helm chart definition and then this definition could be used to display data in catalog)
We are also using it to provide self-service actions.
The main problem it's solving is management complexity of similar self-hosted services (e.g. Backstage)
Very nice UI for our end users!
Difficult to troubleshoot jq queries in json