Today, at the Team22 user conference, Atlassian announced the launch of Compass, a developer portal designed to enable developers to collaborate on security, compliance and projects in a single location. 

Compass introduces a range of new features designed to make it easier for developers to create and manage services throughout the environment, including a component catalog for mapping the elements used to build software, scorecards to track the health of these components and an extensibility engine for customizing workflows. 

For enterprises and decision-makers, Compass provides a solution for reducing complexity for development teams, offering greater visibility over key services while giving them the ability to customize and optimize workflows as necessary so they can remain satisfied and productive. 

The problem

The release of Compass comes as the complexity of the development environment has increased, and developers have struggled to cope with an ever-increasing workload. In fact, research shows that 83% of developers suffer from burnout with the top reason cited being increased workload. 

Compass aims to make that workload more manageable by providing developers with better visibility and a single solution to collaborate. 

“To take advantage of cloud benefits like scale, cost and resiliency, developers have to write their software using micro services. This is far more complex than traditional monoliths in different ways, including the fact that a service could be comprised of dozens or hundreds of micro services,” said head of agile and devops solutions at Atlassian, Tiffany To. “Tracking all the components used to build these services to architect, assemble, and manage health is a very difficult collaboration between devs, platform teams and IT.” 

As a result, software isn’t just written anymore, it’s assembled. Furthermore, developers are responsible for both building and operating software, including maintenance and uptime. This internal maze of technologies creates unnecessary overhead, reducing productivity, increasing developer “toil” time, duplicating efforts and, ultimately, slowing down how quickly they can ship software. 

By providing a single source of truth with a component catalog and scorecards, it’s much easier for developers to maintain control over projects and ensure that they’re secure. 

The development market 

Atlassian’s release of Compass comes as researchers expect the global application development market to reach $733.5 billion by 2028, as more organizations look to develop and onboard new solutions to streamline their operations. 

It also comes amid a wider trend of private companies releasing open source developer portal solutions. For instance, Spotify’s open source Backstage tool provides a solution for building developer portals that enables users to manage multiple services in a single location.

Another is the open-source platform Clutch, Lyft’s extensible infrastructure management platform designed to help users build and manage workflows alongside other platforms like AWS, Envoy and Kubernetes. 

However, To suggests that Compass’ turnkey nature is what differentiates itself from other open-source competitors.  

“In comparison to open-source options that are more open-ended, we aim to be highly turnkey with Compass so that it’s flexible but also opinionated with embedded best practices for DevOps,” To said.  

Compass offers users cataloging capabilities and scoreboards that are integral to “codify devops best practices and enable rituals for teams like CheckOps, a weekly review using an automated summary of actions to take based on the scorecards.”