Use Our New Navigation to Simplify IaC Project Management

Today, we are happy to announce an upgrade to the navigation experience on the env0 platform, designed to make project management smoother and more intuitive.

This enhancement provides improved oversight of your entire IaC activity, enabling quicker adjustments and more precise control over your projects.

What’s New?

Going beyond just a series of UX improvements, this update opens the door to multiple practical benefits, which I'll cover below. But first, let’s dive into the highlights of this release:

1. A new interface for easier navigation through sub-projects:

2. A simple one-click way to add sub-projects to the parent project:

3. An improved search capability, enabled by a behind-the-scenes scoring system, will accurately match relevant projects and sub-projects with your search query. 

4. A quicker way to reach setting screens and dashboards.

Together, these streamline the task of IaC project management, saving valuable time, creating clarity, and helping you to quickly move through your tasks.

The Importance of Projects’ Structure 

To understand the “why” behind our new navigation, consider the challenges that our customer would encounter as they scale their IaC operations, which include:

• Disorganization: Initially manageable systems can rapidly evolve into complex and messy configuration.
• Attribution issues: With expanding team sizes and project scopes, pinpointing the source of specific changes becomes increasingly difficult, hindering troubleshooting, cost analytics, etc.
• Hierarchical limitations: Traditional project management often sticks to a "flat" single-tier hierarchy, which may not suffice for the granular control required in complex setups.

One effective way of dealing with these (and other) hurdles, is by utilizing a structured hierarchy of projects and sub-projects. This allows you to introduce granular control by allocating sub-projects for different teams, applications, or environment types (e.g., development, staging, and production).

Here are a few examples of how that would work:

1. Access control: Taking the above example and allocating sub-projects for particular applications, you can use our platform to easily manage role-based access.
   For instance, you might prevent members of the mobile app team from making unauthorized changes to the payments app.
2. Approval policies: By assigning each environment (development, production, staging) to a separate sub-project, you can use env0 to set distinct approval policies.
   For example, you might require senior team members to approve changes in the production environment, but not for development or staging.
3. Variables and secrets management: Using env0 you can set up variables and secrets to be inherited from parent to sub-project. This saves time and improves reliability and coherency, while still giving you the option to customize setups for specific sub-projects. 
4. Cost controls: Our platform offers a set of cost management tools that provide detailed cost estimations for planned infrastructure changes, customizable alerts to prevent budget overruns, and detailed financial breakdowns of actual expenses. 
   These controls are configurable at both project and sub-project levels, helping you optimize your IaC expenses. For instance, you can set tighter budget thresholds for your staging and development environments, or put in place tailored alerts for areas where expenses are prone to ramp up.

Wrapping up

Implementing a hierarchy of projects and sub-projects is a make-sense good practice that enables precise customization on the one hand and standardization on the other, helping you meet broad organizational needs and specific operational demands. 

With its new navigational upgrades, env0 now offers new and better ways to visualize and interact with your projects, saving precious time and enhancing efficiency and accuracy. 

Want to learn more? 

Open a free account and try env0 yourself or schedule a technical demo to see our platform in action.

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