Internal Developer Platform - Streamline your operations
A platform is a group of technologies that are used as a base upon which other applications, processes or technologies are developed.
That said, the common aspects in everything that a platform team does are:
Enabling developer self-service across the organization Keeping systems reliable and maintanable Ensuring that developers' experience of working with the infrastructure is not compromised Platforms are a great way to streamline development workflows, since they enforce common company standards, ways of working, and best practices that ensures that everyone is moving in the same direction.
By doing this, platforms abstract away complexity and toil, allowing your teams to concentrate on solving real business problems and makes it easy for your teams to build, deploy and operate products. This, in turn, will allow your organization to accelerate its time to market, increase revenue, reduce costs and create innovative products for your customers.
Since platforms reduce all these complexities, the workers will become happier as their cognitive load lower. Platforms abstract away the usual infrastructure concerns, which leads to reduced onboarding times for new joiners, a mover between teams, a leaver or the onboarding of a new development team. It will also become easier to attract new talent as your organization will have time to stay up to date on technology, which will encourage talented engineers to join your organization and which will create more recruitment options.
Concentrating specialized skills in platform teams means recruitment efforts for development teams can focus on developers, testers, etc., without requiring more costly, specialized cloud or platform skills.
“I am convinced the majority of people managing infrastructure just want a PaaS. The only requirement: it has to be built by them.”
Benefits
Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) are configured by Ops teams and used by developers. Ops teams specify what resources start upwith what environment or at what request. They also set base-line templates for application configurations and govern permissions. This helps them to automate recurring tasks such as spinning up environments and resources and makes their setup easier to maintain by enforcing standards. Developer teams gain autonomy by changing configurations, deploying, spinning up fully provisioned environments, and rollback.
They provide a series of benefits that reduce manual ops, waiting times, cost and maintenance
- Developer Self-service: Your developers will be able to get access to all tools and techs needed in their day to day work, eliminating waiting times.
- Reusabilty: Templates (both for apps & infra) are defined once and then used across all the organization, ensuring a simple way to follow standards, performing upgrades.
- Automation: By using platforms, automated jobs can be configured once and run everywhere.
- Simplification: Design easy to follow golden paths and workflows for your teams, kickstarted by templates and examples.
Examples
Krateo
Krateo is an open-source product that uses a fully managed architecture to describe and manage services and resources via standard APIs. A resource can be everything: a Kubernetes cluster, a database, Machine Learning model, a data pipeline workflow, a microservice. Choose your template and start creating!
Conclusion
Adopting an internal developer platform (IDP) allows businesses to streamline development processes, enforce standards, and enhance collaboration and efficiency among teams.
Implementing a platform brings several advantages. It enables developers to focus on business problem-solving rather than infrastructure complexities, accelerating time to market and gaining a competitive edge while automation and standardization reduce manual operations, waiting times, and maintenance costs.
Platforms enhance the developer experience, simplify onboarding, and attract talented engineers by abstracting infrastructure concerns and offering self-service capabilities. By concentrating specialized skills in platform teams, businesses optimize recruitment efforts, save costs, and ensure the right expertise supports development teams.