From Manual Requests to Self‑Serve: Building an Access‑Controlled App that Adapts Automatically

Platform teams often end up as the bottleneck for “small” operational asks: add a new button, wire up a workflow, expose one more cloud capability—each change requiring engineering time, reviews, and releases. In this technical deep dive, engineers from the Department of Government Services (Victoria) share the architecture and open source CDK library behind their “Infrastructure Control Panel”: a modular operational enablement app that lets non-technical users interact safely with cloud resources through strong access controls. Built in Datadog App Builder, the app updates its own capabilities without manual engineering intervention. You’ll see the module pattern that makes incremental feature delivery straightforward, how the system dynamically updates to identify environments and their capabilities, and how feedback from this project has helped shape the App Builder product over time. Walk away with a repeatable design approach that reduces your toil while empowering your users.