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Retool Personas

This document focuses on the identifying example Retool personas supporting the Retool platform when installed in a self-hosted manner.

Retool Personas​

The Retool Platform provides a developer focused solution to provide high-quality software. While developer focused, the high-level owners that participate in a successful Retool implementation are:

  • Technical Owner(s) - Oversees the development of use cases and is considered the owner. He/She is accountable for delivering to the end-users and plays a key role in bridging the gap between developers and the business side (the next persona).
  • Business Owner(s) - Responsible for gathering requirements for specific use case(s) and often has a background and knowledge in business needs. He/She understands the potential impact on the teams that will be using Retool and is instrumental in aligning the future solutions with business objectives and incorporating feedback from end-users.

For organizations that are early in their Retool adoption, the technical owners will be a developer and an administrator/architect. For organizations that are further in their Retool journey where the platform is being centrally managed, the technical owners will be a developer and centralized administrator/architect team, sometimes referred to as a platform team. For organizations that allow Retool to be distributed and owned per business function, segregation of the roles into architect, administrator, devops, and developer may occur. The following sections provide additional details of each role.

Retool Platform Architect​

The Retool Platform Architect is a solution architect role that helps with defining how the platform will be deployed securely and scalably within the enterprise’s AWS organization/account and assists with unlocking access to distributed data services within the organization.

Required Skills​

This role requires 3-5 years of deep expertise in AWS infrastructure in properly configuring the AWS infrastructure to deploy Retool and configure Resources to access downstream databases, APIs, and GraphQL endpoints.

AWS Infrastructure​

Retool Self-hosted employs container orchestration solutions such as Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS for production applications. Deploying the Retool Platform in such solutions requires knowledge of the following topics:

  • AWS Networking (VPC, Internet Gateway, NAT Gateway, Router Tables, Subnets, Security Groups, NACLs, NLB/ALB)
  • Amazon ECS using Fargate compute
  • Amazon EKS using EC2 compute
  • Amazon EKS Autoscaling (Cluster Autoscaler, Karpenter)
  • Amazon Route53 (DNS)
  • Kubernetes Ingress with Amazon Certificate Manager / CA Certificates
  • Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation)
  • Installation of Retool using Helm Kubernetes Package Manager and/or Kubernetes Manifests
  • Amazon Aurora Postgres or Amazon RDS Postgres (Multi-AZ, Snapshots, Maintenance Windows)
  • Enterprise Business Continuity Plan for Retool (e.g. RTO/RPO)
Serverless​

Retool Platform integrates with a wide range of APIs or GraphQL endpoints that are exposed by Amazon API Gateway and Amazon App Sync. Understanding the range of solutions an enterprise is employing, how the data is structured, and how it is governed will help in establishing Resources and the Query Library with Retool. Additional serverless services could include:

  • Amazon S3
  • AWS Lambda exposed via Amazon API Gateway
  • Amazon EventBridge
  • Amazon Step Functions
Data Services​

Retool Platform leverages downstream Databases, APIs and GraphQL endpoints to power solutions. Many enterprises leverage a combination of best-of-breed data solutions including relational, no-SQL, columnar, graph, and time-series databases. Understanding the range of solutions an enterprise is employing, how the data is structured, and how it is governed will help in establishing Resources and the Query Library with Retool. The following is also required to permit access to these resources:

  • IAM Roles / Policies
  • Cross-account access if accessing data within an AWS Organization / varying AWS Accounts
  • AWS Networking (NLB/ALB, Target Groups)

Experience with AWS Generative AI / AI services will be a future requirement as more organizations move to consume Foundation Models / ML in their Retool applications, workflows, and chabots.

  • Amazon Bedrock (optional)
  • Amazon Titan LLM (optional)
  • OpenAI LLMs (optional)
  • Anthropic LLMs (optional)
  • AWS AI Services (e.g. Textract, Transcribe, Rekognition, Forecast)

Recommended Education / Certifications​

  • AWS Solution Architect Associate
  • AWS Solution Architect Professional
  • Retool Platform Architect (available Q1 2024)

Retool Platform Administrator​

The Retool Platform Administrator owns the day to day maintenance of the Retool Platform and should have 2-3 years experience administering SaaS business applications (e.g. Atlassian, Workday, ServiceNow). The core focus is on managing organization, project, and data access, integrating source code management, integrating Identity Provider(s), and maintaining backups of the Retool Database if required:

  • Identity provider integration to support SSO
  • Source code management integration (e.g. GitHub)
  • Org management / Spaces
  • Project management / Permissions
  • Data management / Permissions
  • Auditing access
  • Analytics for Retool utilization
Identity Provider Management​

To scale user management on the Retool Platform, integration with Identity Providers using OIDC, SAML, LDAP is a requirement. Retool Platform Administrators should have direct experience with the Enterprise IdP as well as SCIM for user provisioning in Retool via the SCIM API. This capability supports Retool Spaces, a new Enterprise capability for Retool Self-hosted.

Source Code Management​

Within the Retool Platform, Retool Apps, Resources and Workflows can be protected via Source Code Management integration of common Git providers including GitHub, GitLab, AWS CodeCommit, Atlassian BitBucket and Azure Repos. Knowledge of administering Git repositories in these tools is required in order to integrate in the Retool Platform.

Access Management​

Authorization of users to Retool Apps, Workflows, Mobile, Resources, Queries and other elements is controlled via the Retool Admin user. The Retool Platform Administrator needs to become an expert on providing the proper privileges to support a least-privileged model. Monitoring access via audit logs and analytics can be used by the administrator to confirm proper utilization and adoption.

Resource Management​

Adding, updating and deleting resources for the Retool Platform will be a core responsibility of the Administrator. Managing resources should be a collaboration with the Retool Platform Architect and Administrator. Where the Architect has full knowledge and access to destination resources, security policies etc., the Administrator can work to add, update, and delete them as directed.

Recommended Education / Certifications​

  • Retool Platform Administrator (available Q1 2024)
  • Retool Platform Developer (optional)

Retool Platform DevOps​

The Retool Platform DevOps is focused on platform health and supporting automation to scale across the enterprise and should have 2-3 years experience supporting production Kubernetes applications in AWS. Representative work includes:

Patching / upgrades​

  • Observability / Platform health (e.g. Collectors for metrics, logging, alert and notification management)
  • Scalability of underlying Kubernetes infrastructure (e.g. HPA, VPA, Cluster Autoscaler, Karpenter)
  • Development of Automations using Platform APIs / Events

Required Skills​

Upgrades​

Upgrading Retool requires knowledge of containers and the Retool Self-hosted installation process either via Kubernetes Manifests or Helm. Also consideration for production environments should include establishing blue-green deployment so as to support a zero-downtime requirement (if applicable). If not required, creating a staging environment to perform installation dry-runs and end to end testing to confirm no regressions post upgrade is recommended. In addition experience with Amazon RDS Postgres database including exporting / importing backups, and managing snapshots.

Observability​

Retool Platform metrics and logs can be collected using solutions such as OpenTelemetry / Amazon Cloudwatch Container Insights and Fluent Bit for example. The Retool Platform DevOps role will focus on deploying similar solutions along with necessary IAM updates and Amazon CloudWatch configuration. Establishing Alarms / Notifications using Thresholds or Anomaly detection is also an important activity for production deployments.

Scalability​

With the Retool Platform deployed in Kubernetes, determination of manual scaling via kubectl, configuration of Cluster Autoscaler or Karpenter should be identified via the Retool Platform Architect and Retool Platform DevOps. Automated scaling will require instrumentation of the Kubernetes cluster to track important metrics to trigger scale-out and scale-in events.

DevOps Automations​

Retool provides a new Retool API supporting the following capabilities:

  • Users
  • User Attributes
  • Groups
  • Folders
  • Spaces
  • Source Control
  • App Themes
  • SSO
  • Permissions
  • Access Request
  • User Invite

Developing custom integrations to this API to help with automation in scaling the Retool platform or collecting information in support of DevOps can become a common activity. Examples of this could be user onboarding and automating space configuration. Skills required to perform this include knowledge of Retool Apps, Workflows, REST APIs.

Recommended Education / Certifications​

  • AWS SysOps Administrator Associate
  • AWS DevOps Professional
  • Kubernetes Administrator
  • Retool Platform Architect

Retool Platform Developer​

The Retool Platform Developer will have 1-3 years development experience and focuses on creating Retool Apps, Retool AI Apps, Workflows, Mobile leveraging the Retool eco-system of services (e.g. RetoolDB, Retool Storage, Retool Email), AWS services and/or Enterprise specific services.

Required Skills​

Retool development focuses on the following core starter knowledge.

  • JavaScript for data transformation, embedded business logic or dynamic queries
  • SQL if consuming data from Database(s)
  • APIs if consuming data from REST APIs (optional)
  • GraphQL is consuming data from GraphQL endpoints (optional)
  • CSS if performing customization of UX presentation (optional)
  • Experience with Git SCM and Feature branching (e.g. GitHub, GitLab)
  • Experience with Python (if using as alternative to JavaScript Logic in Workflows)

Recommended Education / Certifications​

  • AWS Developer Associate
  • Retool Platform Developer (available Q1 2024)
  • Retool Platform Fundamentals (JavaScript, SQL, APIs)

Retool Platform End-user​

The Retool Platform end-user is consuming Retool Apps, Mobile leveraging the appropriate browser and/or mobile app. This user will require support in understanding how to use the application along with supporting them in the event they have issues.

Required Skills​

This role focuses on proper use of Retool applications supporting the enterprise. Education provided by the enterprise as well as business process knowledge that the application encapsulates is recommended.

Recommended Education / Certifications​

Basic web or mobile skills.