How the enterprise Astra Developer Platform based on 'Botsman' and GitFlik addresses the key challenges of in‑house development

      Astra Developer Platform (ADP) based on "Botsman" and GitFlic creates a unified workspace for developers where key processes are automated and standardized. This reduces cognitive load, eliminates infrastructure delays, and optimizes resource usage, accelerating product releases and cutting costs. Details — in an IT World article.

      Introduction

      Modern studies show that up to 80% of lost productivity can be related to frequent task switching between tools and teams: returning to the original context takes 20–23 minutes, which, when converted to the working time of a single team, also amounts to thousands of hours annually [1][2][3].

      Enterprise developers use between 6 and 13 tools daily: IDEs, CI/CD systems, consoles, issue trackers, logging systems, monitoring tools, secret and infrastructure management services — and that’s only the basic set. For each issue you have to switch to a separate platform or system, recall interfaces and workflows. Every switch requires returning to the previous state, remembering details, redoing authorization, reviewing logs and documentation.

      On the other hand, modern enterprise development faces a number of systemic problems: new regulatory requirements regarding RBPO, human factor issues, manual processes, outdated infrastructure models, and excessive expenses.

      These two key factors lead to an unjustified increase in development costs, and unproductive expenses eat up budgets and delay achieving results.

      Astra Developer Platform (ADP) based on "Botsman" and GitFlic becomes a technological and organizational response to many of these challenges.

      How does ADP reduce cognitive load?

      ADP reduces the number of entry points for developers: all main scenarios, service statuses, logs and parameters are managed through a single panel or API. A centralized service catalog appears with integrated security best practices, templates and full event auditing — everything needed for quick testing, development and deployment. There is no need to jump between Jenkins, Terraform, the console and the internal repository — all information and actions are available in one place.

      Routine automation (CI/CD, builds, tests, deployments) is handled by ADP without the need for manual triggers and one-off scripts.

      Reduction of cognitive overload: fewer platforms, fewer external documents, fewer switches. Maximum focus on the task and business logic rather than infrastructure details.

      Self-service scaling, starting new services, managing secrets or updating environments — in one click/API call.

      Overall, developers and DevOps teams traditionally face the need to manually prepare environments for development, testing and releases. This includes writing scripts, manually configuring networks, resources and security, deploying databases, and communicating between teams to submit requests for creating or changing infrastructure. Such practice leads to:

      - Multi-day waits to provision a test environment

      - Dependence on DevOps for every change

      - Errors due to the human factor

      - “Stuck” requests in queues and slowing down the entire delivery process

      ADP automates these tasks: instead of manual scripts, the platform provides templates, standard scenarios and self-service APIs. The developer selects the required environment components, the infrastructure is created automatically and almost instantly — appropriate security policies and resources are applied according to company standards, without human intervention.

      In corporate companies, processes between developers and DevOps are often asymmetric: environments are deployed slowly, their preparation stretches over weeks, infrastructure becomes obsolete or does not meet testing requirements, bottlenecks appear and long waits for a prepared environment occur.

      ADP based on "Botsman" provides resource isolation through Projects, automatic scaling and the release of irrelevant resources for optimal use of internal and external clouds. This enables ephemeral environments on demand — the developer selects the application version, receives a clean test environment, and after finishing work the platform deletes unused resources.

      All of the above points lead to the following defensive reaction from developers when creating test and development environments: “Ask for more, they will give as much as needed.” This leads to millions of rubles in overpayment, idle servers and complicated expense accounting and, as a consequence, increased product cost.

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      ADP based on "Botsman" and GitFlic optimizes resource management: automated tools create infrastructure on a “right-sized” basis. End-to-end analytics help spot "stuck" clusters or databases, free up resources for other teams and optimize costs — paying only for what is actually used.

      Overall, the following systemic effects can be noted from switching to ADP based on "Botsman" and GitFlic solutions:

      - Standardization of processes: templates and policies are uniform across teams, ensuring compliance with security requirements, efficient resource use, fast delivery and minimization of production errors.

      - Cost optimization: IDP transparently displays resource usage, allowing analysis and reduction of excessive infrastructure costs.

      - Reduced load and burnout: fewer manual tasks and repetitions, which positively affects motivation and quality of work.

      - High product release speed: environments come up instantly, changes and testing are implemented without downtime and waits.

      - Career and growth of the platform team: focus shifts from manual support to the development of internal platforms and new tools.

      Practical example of a developer working with ADP

      - The developer selects the required service and environment in a unified interface.

      - A request to create an environment automatically initiates the formation of a namespace, resource allocation, secret configuration, build and deploy to "Botsman" — all processes follow templates and standards.

      - All information on logs, tests, and deploy status is in ADP’s unified catalog.

      - If a new service is required — the platform itself will suggest a suitable template and integration.

      - After work is finished the environment is released, resources are freed, and the budget is optimized.

      In conclusion, it should be noted that Astra Developer Platform based on "Botsman" and GitFlic becomes for enterprise development not just a technology, but a transformation tool: manual processes are minimized, infrastructure queues and delays disappear, costs are optimized, cognitive load is reduced and the long-awaited development speed is achieved. The developer gets a single, automated and transparent working space, and companies get flexibility, security and platform growth.

      Sources:

      [1]

      How Can You Reduce Developer Context Switching?

      [2]

      Context Switching in Software Engineering

      [3]

      Cognitive Overload In Coding: Hidden Challenge for ...

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