Internal Developer Platforms
An internal developer platform (IDP) is a self-service layer that abstracts infrastructure complexity behind golden paths, letting application teams deploy, observe, and manage services without filing tickets or learning every underlying tool.
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Intro
Internal Developer Platforms
An Internal Developer Platform, or IDP, is the integrated product through which software teams discover and consume an organization's delivery capabilities. It joins interfaces such as APIs, templates, configuration, command-line tools, and a developer portal to automation and providers underneath. The aim is a coherent journey, not a single giant product or a branded dashboard over tickets.
A useful architecture separates experience, control, and resource concerns. The experience layer helps users discover capabilities, supply intent, and observe outcomes. The control layer validates that intent, applies policy, coordinates work, and records state. Resource providers perform the specialized work: source control, CI, cloud APIs, clusters, identity, databases, and observability systems.
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Sources
- https://tag-app-delivery.cncf.io/whitepapers/platforms/
Supports
- Platform capabilities, interfaces, providers, users, teams, and operating characteristics
- Self-service, security, measurement, and platform implementation challenges
- https://tag-app-delivery.cncf.io/whitepapers/platform-eng-maturity-model/
Supports
- Platform evolution across interfaces, operations, adoption, investment, and measurement
- https://backstage.io/docs/features/software-catalog/
Supports
- Catalog metadata, ownership, discoverability, source-controlled entity metadata, and integrated tooling
- https://backstage.io/docs/features/software-templates/
Supports
- Template inputs, steps, skeleton generation, publication, task status, cancellation, and results
- https://backstage.io/docs/features/techdocs/
Supports
- Documentation-as-code integrated with cataloged software