What does a day in the life of a developer in a DoD Software Factory look like? Ideally, it's spent writing mission-critical code. But the reality is often a struggle against friction—wrestling with complex cloud configurations and navigating disjointed tools.
What does a day in the life of a DoD Software Factory developer look like? Ideally, it’s spent writing mission-critical code. But the reality is often a struggle against friction. They’re wrestling with complex cloud configurations, deciphering dense security requirements, navigating a disjointed collection of tools, and waiting on tickets for basic access.
This friction creates immense cognitive load—the mental energy spent on tasks other than creating value. When developers are forced to be experts in Kubernetes, Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies, Authority to Operate (ATO) compliance, and infrastructure provisioning, their ability to deliver capability to the warfighter grinds to a halt.
The solution is a true developer platform. Not just a collection of tools, but a thoughtfully constructed paved path—an opinionated, supported, and streamlined route for building and shipping software securely. This path is built on a foundation of empathy for the developer’s daily journey.
While blueprints like Platform One’s Big Bang lay the initial gravel, they leave the most difficult terrain for you to pave yourself. SmoothGlue™ is the turn-key solution that paves this path from end-to-end, creating a world-class developer experience that accelerates mission delivery.
A basic DevSecOps toolchain is a great start, but it leaves your teams at the edge of a wilderness. The road to a production-ready, accredited system remains unpaved, forcing your developers to face hazards that increase cognitive load and risk:
Answering these questions with internal resources is a slow, expensive proposition that diverts your best engineers from the mission. It’s like being handed an engine and being asked to build a car around it while driving.
SmoothGlue is a comprehensive, production-ready platform that builds upon the Big Bang foundation and extends it with the enterprise-grade capabilities necessary for mission success. We pave the road so your developers can move at the speed of relevance.
Our production-grade IaC removes the burden of infrastructure decisions from your developers by offering automated, hardened support for AWS EKS and RKE2 (with CIS mode) across the full spectrum of DoD hosting locations, from commercial cloud to Top Secret/SCI, including:
Designed as an airgap-first distribution, every component (code, software, and documentation) is available and functional in fully disconnected environments. We automate the hardening of the entire system so your platform is secure and resilient from day one.
Instead of a labyrinth, SmoothGlue provides a secure on-ramp to achieving your ATO. These built-in "guardrails" on the paved path include:
This frees developers from having to become compliance experts and dramatically shortens the ATO timeline.
A paved path requires maintenance. The SmoothGlue Console provides a command center for automating complex Day 2 operations and streamlining user onboarding. We handle the difficult lifecycle management tasks that paralyze platform teams, like the automated migration from Promtail to Alloy or providing a guided, blue-green upgrade path for the operatorless Istio migration. This ensures the platform remains modern and secure without burdening your team.
Thinking about the DevSecOps landscape today is like looking back at the rise of Linux. In the early days, choosing a Linux distribution was a critical first step, but it was just that—a start. No one would seriously claim that Google's global infrastructure is "just a wrapper for Linux." The OS is the foundational kernel, but the product is the immense value, integration, and capability built on top of it.
This is the right way to view the relationship between SmoothGlue and Big Bang.
Big Bang provides an essential, standardized kernel for DoD DevSecOps, from which SmoothGlue builds a complete, mission-ready product. SmoothGlue is not just a wrapper; it is the comprehensive suite of enterprise services, mission-specific integrations, and dedicated support that makes the foundation powerful, productive, and ready for serious production workloads.
The SmoothGlue platform ensures your deployed systems are truly production-ready with highly available configurations, right-sized resource defaults, and seamless single sign-on integration across tools. To guarantee mission success, dedicated support options cover everything from installation and operations to the end-to-end developer experience.
The goal of a DoD Software Factory is not to become an expert in managing a technology kernel. The goal is to deliver superior capability to the warfighter at the speed of relevance, which we have proven over the last 18 months, day-in and day-out.
Stop trailblazing. Empower your teams to focus on the mission, not the plumbing. Schedule a demo today to see how SmoothGlue can accelerate your software delivery.
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