Transformatic

The evolution of the DevOps discipline into Platform Engineering practice shifts the software engineering infrastructure towards Internal Developer Platforms that aggregate and optimize software development tools, frameworks, and user experiences. This paradigm shift improves the productivity of every stakeholder involved, including Chief Technology Officers, Software Application Developers, DevOps professionals, Data Scientists, Product Managers, and other information technology professionals involved in building and improving digital products.

Why use an Internal Developer Platform?

Building on the capabilities offered by cloud computing, generative artificial intelligence, and containerization, platforms (or IDPs) are instrumental in actualizing the long-expected benefits of these developments. These advantages expedite product deployment, portability across diverse infrastructures, enhanced security, and resilience of digitally enabled products while improving the developer experience and positively affecting developer efficiency.

The focus shift towards developer efficiency that supports operational objectives while minimizing redundant efforts throughout technology organizations has led to the widespread adoption of internal developer platforms. The strategic investment in these platforms enables organizations to:

Reduce the cognitive load on software product teams, streamlining the path from product concept to market delivery.
Improve the reliability and resilience of software products by shifting software infrastructure configuration and management to specialized platform engineering experts.
Share resources and knowledge across teams and the enterprise to promote an environment that drives innovation and enables rapid product development.
Control product and service security risks, regulatory compliance, and functional integrity by implementing blanket governance over platform capabilities and the ecosystem of users, tools, and processes that’s zero-trust by default.
Gain insights and capabilities for cost-efficient and proactive management of cloud services and developer tools while retaining overall control over service levels and the end user experience.

The realization of these benefits is attributed to the synergistic effect of having a limited number of platform teams serving an expansive array of product teams, thereby amplifying their collective impact. Additionally, platform teams' centralized management concerning common functionalities simplifies governance processes. Furthermore, these teams' prioritization of user interface and experience design prioritization underscores the user-centric philosophy that defines modern platform engineering initiatives.

IDP Maturity Phases

At their foundational level, internal developer platforms are built to deliver standardized experiences for acquiring and utilizing discrete software development services, including pipeline runners, database systems, and secret management stores. As they mature, these platforms evolve to encompass an integrated suite of services presented as self-service templates designed for key scenarios such as web application development and data analysis, often referred to as Machine Learning Operations (MLOps)

The evolution of internal developer platforms typically progresses through these phases:

Product developers gain the ability to instantaneously provision essential capabilities on demand, leveraging them to operationalize computing resources, storage solutions, databases, and identity management services.
The platform empowers product developers to dynamically provision environments for services, facilitate the execution of pipelines and tasks, store artifacts and configurations, and/or aggregate telemetry data.
Administrators tasked with managing third-party software can seamlessly provision necessary dependencies, such as databases, on demand, thereby streamlining the installation and operation of such software solutions.
Product developers are equipped to instantiate complete environments derived from templates that combine both run-time and development-time services required for specific use cases, including web development or MLOps initiatives.
Product developers and managers gain insights into the functionality, performance, and financial implications through automated instrumentation and standardized dashboard interfaces.

By fostering an environment characterized by uniform, compliant interfaces for individual capabilities or integrated sets thereof, internal developer platforms significantly simplify and enhance users' efficiency in generating and deploying value-driven products.

Critical Points for a Successful IDP Implementation

A well-implemented platform has the potential to improve development efficiency to a great extent. But reaping platform benefits requires several changes, including changing the mindset. These are a few key factors with an outsized impact on a platform’s success:

Platform as a Product. A platform is built to help its users and should grow based on their needs. To give the most value, it should mainly offer features that benefit many teams and focus less on unique features for just one team.
User Experience. A platform should be easy to use, with the same setup across its parts. It should have tools like graphical interfaces, APIs, and command lines to match different users' needs.
Documentation and onboarding. Good documentation is essential for any software. Users need clear instructions and examples to understand how to use a platform. It should have easy-to-follow guides and tools to start new projects quickly.
Self-service. A platform should let users help themselves. They should be able to get what they need quickly and easily. It allows one platform team to support many project teams and grow when necessary.
Reduce cognitive load for users. A platform's main job is making things easier for teams by handling complex tasks. It should keep all the complicated technical stuff behind the scenes. For instance, even if it uses cloud services, users don't need to worry about how those work.
Optional and composable. Platforms are made to speed up product development, not slow it down. They should let teams pick and choose what parts they use. If teams need something the platform doesn't offer, like a particular type of database, they should be able to add and manage it themselves.
Secure by default. A platform should be secure by default and offer capabilities to ensure compliance and validation based on rules and standards defined by the organization.

IDP Capabilities

Here are capability domains to consider when building platforms for cloud-native computing:

Web portals for observing and provisioning products and capabilities.
APIs (and CLIs) are used to provision products and capabilities automatically.
“Golden path” templates and docs enable optimal use of product capabilities.
Automation for building and testing services and products.
Automation for delivering and verifying services and products.
Development environments such as hosted IDEs and remote connection tools
Observability for services and products using instrumentation and dashboards, including observation of functionality, performance, and costs.
Infrastructure services, including compute runtimes, programmable networks, and block and volume storage.
Data services, including databases, caches, and object stores.
Messaging and event services, including brokers, queues, and event fabrics
Identity and secret management services include service and user identity and authorization, certificate and key issuance, and static secret storage.
Security services, including static analysis of code and artifacts, runtime analysis, and policy enforcement.
Artifact storage, including storage of container image and language-specific packages, custom binaries and libraries, and source code.

Introduction to Internal Developer Platforms

Why use an Internal Developer Platform?

IDP Maturity Phases

Critical Points for a Successful IDP Implementation

IDP Capabilities

Functional Diagram