Better Visibility for Better Outcomes with Autodesk Platform Services

ERICA BEFFERT: Hello. Welcome to Better Visibility for Better Outcomes with Autodesk Platform Services.

If you are a current user of Autodesk Platform Services and want to better understand how you can manage the applications you have built, you are in the right spot. If you are new to APS, welcome.

APS helps Autodesk customers extend the capabilities of Autodesk products through solutions such as workflow automation, dashboards, and custom sales configurators. Partners use Autodesk Platform Services APIs to build innovative solutions and reach Autodesk's global customer base by publishing solutions in our App Store.

My name is Erica Beffert-- Senior Group Product Manager for Autodesk Platform Services-- and I'm with I'm here with Yanci Wu, our Senior Experience Designer, to talk about enhancements we are making to the developer experience, to give administrators more visibility and control, and free up developer's time to do what they do best. Build innovative solutions.

Before we go any further, I need to make you aware of our Safe Harbor Statement. This presentation may contain forward-looking statements about our outlook, product capabilities, and strategies. These statements reflect our best judgment based on currently known factors. Actual events or results could differ materially. Please, do not make any purchase decisions based on the content of today's presentation.

As we have talked to APS users over the years and heard who uses the Developer Portal, how they create accounts, and manage their applications, a couple of things became clear.

People were not building applications on their own. Development is a team sport, and there are different people involved playing different roles on the team. Sometimes, this can really vary a lot by the size of the organization.

The experience, however, that we have historically on the APS Developer Portal was built with the assumption that one person wore all of the hats. They started the trial, they made the buying decisions, they built and deployed the apps, they found customers, et cetera.

But what we heard was that teams were working within this constraint. They were sharing credentials among their team, or they were centralizing all of the administrative functions artificially into one person, but that model wasn't serving them very well.

And so we decided that we needed to more intentionally invest in building out tools that support the two key personas. The developer, on the one hand, and the administrator, who handles human resources and manage costs, et cetera, on the other.

In today's class, we will walk you through the progress we have already made towards strengthening the tools available to administrators, and what is coming next.

First, let's talk about some of the administrator pain points that we have heard in talking to folks that are administering applications, such as yourself. When we talk to administrators or we talk to developers that worked with administrators, what we heard is that, first of all, the developers themselves were needing to do a lot of administrative tasks, instead of just being able to focus on writing code.

And we heard that administrators had no role and no visibility into what was going on. That meant that they did not necessarily know how many developers had access to APS at their organization, or how many applications or APS applications they had created. And sometimes, the first time they might know about one of these applications is when that developer left the company, and there was no one left that was able to make changes. This left them unable to manage their personnel, and needed to reach out to Autodesk Support to help transfer the ownership of that APS app to a new developer.

They also weren't able to necessarily see how many tokens were being consumed by the applications that were being created, or what value their organization might be getting out of those applications. And it was those-- that sort of feedback that we're getting.

Quotes such as, "I hate that everything has to go through me for creating it. I hate the manual process for monitoring usage." So in this case, one person was having to do all the administrative work because there was no visibility or access by the rest of the team.

Another administrator complained that right now, it's very difficult to see a top governance token consumption. they maybe, even when we were bringing out some of the app-level features, there was no way for them to roll that up and really get that big picture view. And so those were some of the problems that they were coming to us and asking for a solution.

So next, I want to go over, very briefly, what some of the capabilities are that we've brought over-- brought out over the last year and a half that can help teams today begin to better administer their applications. And then, I'll talk a little bit about what's coming next.

So in terms of the last year, we've released three key features that help individuals better manage their applications. The first is Add Collaborators. This is the ability for app owners to invite other developers to view and edit their app.

Second was Transfer Ownership, the ability for app owners to transfer ownership to another developer, maybe because they're leaving the team, or maybe because they don't want to be responsible for paying for it anymore.

Thirdly, App-Level Token Usage. This is the ability to report on token usage by app, and token usage is visible to all. Now, I'll go into those in detail.

When you create and manage an application within APS, you now have the ability to add collaborators. When you-- and I should probably start out by first saying that when you create an APS application, you are the owner of this application. And that owner has some special permissions such as the ability to delete the app, and the responsibility to pay for that usage.

But you have the ability also to Add Editor or Viewer collaborators, which enable you to delegate permissions to other members of your team to do certain things. So for example, if you need someone to be able to rotate the secrets on your application, you can make them an Editor. But if you need someone else only to be able to look at-- look at the token usage, you maybe you only give them Viewer permissions.

The second capability was transfer of ownership. With this role, the owner of an application has the ability to transfer the ownership of that application to another developer. That ownership comes with that special responsibility to pay for app usage. And so with this particular workflow, it's critical that whoever that ownership is being transferred to must accept and understand those responsibilities. You can't just transfer it to some random person and hope that they'll pay for it for you. So we ensured that there is that complete, both, transfer and acceptance workflow around the applications.

Third, App-Level Token Usage Reporting. Up until the release of this feature, each individual developer was able to go in and look and see a summary of the applications that they owned or that they were the owner of, and how many tokens were being used across all of their apps. With the introduction of App-Level Token Usage Reporting, we not only moved the token usage underneath the App profile, but we made it available and visible to all of the collaborators on the app, so that folks, for example, in the finance department, which may be only need to be able to view the token usage, would be able to do that for selected apps.

We also added the ability to change the date range. Whereas before it was fixed, and you could only see a month at a time, you can now select a configurable range that may match your own billing periods or a particular period of interest that you want to investigate.

So what's coming next? Right now, we're working on a fundamental change called Developer Hubs, which is going to introduce the administrator role that will-- so that an administrator can automatically have visibility into all of those apps that are being created, instead of needing to be added as a collaborator, with the current features that we've added. And I won't say much more about that right now because my colleague, Yanci, will go into that in detail in a few minutes.

The next thing that we have planned after the rollout of Developer Hubs is to bring in Admin-Level Token Usage Reporting, so that administrator will be able to see in one place, how different apps across all of their developers are consuming tokens or using resources, and have more of that holistic summary view of their entire APS spend.

Beyond the release of those two features and going out into the next year, we'll be focusing in these three critical areas. The first is extending the reporting out on the usage of APIs to all APS APIs, not just those that are currently token-- you pay for with tokens. This will give you more visibility overall into the usage of APS by your application.

The second is an investment in cost prediction tools. Not only will we enhance the historical reporting, so they will be able to see what your app-- how your app has consumed APIs over the past year, but we will also invest increasingly in cost prediction tools that will help you to take that historical usage and predict what your costs are going to be in the future based on the growth trajectory of your application.

And finally, cost control, the ability to set limits and thresholds, which will allow you to determine, potentially, at the app level, how many tokens are being spent by your organization.

All right. So now, I want to hand the controls over to Yanci, who will introduce Developer Hubs, a workspace for organizations to manage development activities related to building with Autodesk Platform Services.

YANCI WU: Hi, everyone. My name is Yanci. I'm a Senior Experience Designer of the Developer Experience. I'm here to talk about the Developer Hub today.

So today, only individual accounts can be created on APS, and there is no admin role. This makes it hard for developer admins to know what applications their developers are building, and the token usage associated with those apps.

The Developer Hubs provide a container for the development team to manage all the APS-related work. The hub admins have total visibility and control over the collaborations within the team, the applications that are being built, the cost, and the app analytics.

There are two types of Developer Hubs, providing two levels of capability addressing two different groups. The Personal Hub and the Team Hub. The Personal Hub is for individual developers that don't need management capabilities and developers evaluating APS as part of a trial. Every account comes with a Personal Hub as your default hub.

In the Personal Hub, you can create apps for non-production or production use. You can add collaborators to the apps as viewers or editors. You can move the app to a different hub or transfer the app ownership to someone else. You can also view the API usage and token usage of the apps in your Personal Hub. It is your current experience rebranded.

Team Hub is for customers and partners with a larger development team and/or multiple applications that they manage. Team Hubs need to be created by the team admins in the Account Portal, and they are linked to your Autodesk teams.

There are two roles in the Team Hub. The Admin role and the Developer role. Admins can add members to the hub, manage all the apps created in the hub, and view their API and token usage, transfer the apps between developers, or move the apps to a different hub.

Next, I want to walk you through the Developer Hub experience. As a hub admin, you can go to the APS home page and click the Developer Hubs button, which will take you to the Developer Hubs.

And now, we're in a Developer Hub. In the upper-left corner, there is a Hub Selector that allows you to jump to different hubs. You can be a member of multiple Team Hubs.

Now, we're in a Team Hub. As an admin, you can view and manage all the apps created in the Hub by all the members. You can move the app to a different hub that you are a member of. This function will be useful if you're building an app for a client and want to transfer it to the company's hub once done.

If someone is leaving the company or the project, you can transfer the app ownership to someone else in the hub or outside of the hub.

If we click on the App Detail, we can see the settings. The admins can regenerate the secret, add App Details, API Selection, add Collaborators, or Delete the app. Basically, anything the owner can do, the admin can do.

If you click on the Token Usage tab, you will see the token consumption of this app, and you can filter the result by API and Date Range. Everyone that has access to this app can see the app-level reporting. On the Roadmap, we're planning to build a hub-level reporting for the hub admins.

And if you go to the Hub Members page, this is where you, as admins, control which developers have access to the hub. You can add members as admins or developers, and you can change their role. And you can add anyone who is in the company or outside of the company.

Now, let's go to your Personal Hub. Here, you will see all the apps you created in the Hub, and the apps that are shared with you outside of a context of a team. Again, this is your existing experience rebranded as a Personal Hub. You can use the Personal Hub to build test apps and move them to the Team Hubs once ready.

You may wonder, when will Developer Hubs become available? In Q4, we are launching the private beta with our beta partners, and in early 2025, Team Hubs will be available for Enterprise customers and members of the Autodesk Developer Network with two or more members, with other groups to follow. If you're interested in adopting Team Hubs, please reach out to our product manager, Dwanill, to get on the list.

To further help admins increase efficiency when managing applications, we released the Application Management API in July. The Application Management API offers a new way to manage your APS apps. With the help of a robust set of endpoints, you can now automate your Application Management experience on the APS Developer Portal.

Here are a few things you can do with this API. First, you can retrieve a list of applications that you own or where you have View or Edit permissions. You can view all collaborators on an app with their email access level, and invite acceptance date. Secondly, you can use the API to automate client secret rotation to avoid downtime. And third, you can check daily token usage for applications you own or collaborate on, with options to filter by date range or API.

We're interested in hearing what other capabilities you would like to see in the Application Management API.

The Developer Ecosystem Public Roadmap is available on the APS website, under the Community section. You can also scan this QR code to access it.

On the Roadmap page, you can vote on the admin features plan or suggest a new feature. Your feedback plays an important role in shaping our roadmap, and helps us ensure the features we are building will make your job easier and more delightful.

That concludes the presentation. And I know from what we shared today, you all are equally as excited as we are. If you're interested in staying connected with us and provide continuous feedback, please join the Vanguard Program. We recruit people from the Vanguard Group for research studies and to participate in beta programs. Thank you, and we're excited to hear from you.