Developer platforms are purpose-built tools that let developers ship software more autonomously. They give engineers self-service access to complex workflows, such as provisioning infrastructure components or deploying staging environments.
In this article, we’re going to unpack key developer platform benefits and drawbacks so you can decide whether investing in one is right for your team. We’ll also explore the critical question posed by new-generation AI tools: Why invest in a developer platform when there’s already AI agents that behave like lightweight platform replacements?
What exactly is a developer platform?
Developer platforms let developers self-serve complex processes using predefined golden paths. They’re treated as internally-facing products that exist to serve developer needs.
Successful IDP implementations improve software delivery speed, efficiency, and consistency. For instance, an IDP could give developers one-click access to production logs. That ability eliminates manual console commands and avoids sharing cloud credentials with individual engineers.
Popular IDP tools include:
- Backstage: A leading open-source framework for building service catalogs and developer-facing portals.
- Port: A developer portal that also includes workflow automation features.
- HashiCorp Waypoint: An infrastructure-oriented option that simplifies deployment workflows and cloud lifecycle management.
Other types of developer platforms can help simplify specific use cases. For example, Quali Torque is a complete infrastructure orchestration solution that comes with built-in agentic AI. It automates infrastructure operations, enables self-service deployments, and provides engineers with access to conversational AI that accelerates everyday tasks.
Many teams also create their own developer platforms from scratch by layering custom portal interfaces, CI/CD solutions, IaC tools, and workflow automation engines. Such platforms are called internal developer platforms (IDPs). Building an IDP can accelerate your software delivery process, but, as we’ll see below, it also brings challenges such as high upfront investment and significant ongoing maintenance requirements.
Understanding developer platform benefits
Engineering teams are rapidly adopting IDPs. A 2024 research report from Port found that almost 85% of companies have either implemented an developer platform, or are planning to do so within a year. Similarly, Gartner expects a 23.7% compound annual growth in the market for platform engineering services, which includes IDP development.
Developer platforms are popular because they solve real-world software delivery challenges. Modern toolchains are complex and diverse, typically combining multiple systems to successfully ship each change:IaC, CI/CD, automated test suites, and observability platforms must all work together, for instance
Having many moving parts increases developer cognitive load and makes it harder to apply effective governance controls. But with an IDP, platform teams can configure simple automated pathways that wrap all these components into approved one-click actions.
Developer platforms offer several compelling benefits at the business-level too
- Accelerated time-to-market: Platforms permit self-service access to automated workflows, letting developers work more autonomously. This increases throughput, which can yield a competitive advantage.
- Reduced development risk through enhanced consistency and governance: Platforms standardize tools and processes, providing more opportunities to run compliance checks.
- Simpler, more satisfying developer workflows: Well-designed internal platforms improve DevEx by removing friction from day-to-day processes.
- More agile and scalable development: Platforms help centralize processes and knowledge, preventing it from becoming siloed with individuals.
These rewards are driving the rush to build or buy developer platforms. Who doesn’t want a system that seems to simultaneously improve throughput, reduce risk, and support future scalability? Of course, in practice, it’s never quite this straightforward.
The drawbacks and realities of developer platform engineering
Platform engineering has gotten a lot of attention lately, but it has a darker side that’s talked about less often. For every successful IDP implementation, there are also plenty of failures.
Adoption failure is commonplace when trying any new technology, but it’s particularly impactful in the world of platform engineering. Here, building a functioning platform can mean weeks of upfront work. If the expected benefits don’t materialize, then you waste huge amounts of engineering time and budget.
Problems often stem from inaccurately predicting how much effort building an IDP actually requires. Beyond just building your platform, you need to document it, test it, and then train developers how to use it. Afterwards, you need to obtain clear visibility into platform utilization and performance metrics so you can build targeted improvements.
Moreover, developer platforms never stand still once they’re launched. They need to be continually maintained as your development process evolves. Failure to do so can make it harder to adopt future technologies: If your existing toolchain is contained in one failing platform, you won’t be able to easily connect new services.
Implementing a developer platform poses several other practical challenges that can prevent you from realizing the potential benefits:
- High upfront investment: Platform implementations take a long time to mature, depend on dedicated teams of specialists, and can be expensive to build. Commercial platform solutions are typically priced per-developer, leading to substantial costs at scale.
- Adoption issues: Developers may be hesitant to adopt new platforms, whether due to uncertainty over how to use them, or roadblocks such as missing documentation.
- Maintenance burden: Failing to plan for platform maintenance requirements can cause unexpected delivery bottlenecks.
- Poor visibility into platform activity: IDPs must be instrumented to expose granular observability data. Without adoption, performance, and cost metrics, stakeholders can’t accurately analyze what’s working or calculate a true ROI.
- Platforms can increase complexity: If your development process and toolchain is already letting you meet your OKRs and SLOs, then introducing a developer platform may be overkill and could actually distract from more meaningful work.
Despite such drawbacks, there are still reasons to invest developer platforms. However, the issues must be considered carefully before you begin implementation. Your platform will only contribute engineering value if it solves real challenges in your organization. You will also be able to allocate enough engineering resources to enable regular maintenance through the platform’s life.
Do you need a Developer Platform? How to decide
Developer platforms centralize software delivery tools and processes. They unlock safe self-service developer access while enabling platform teams to reliably enforce security and compliance requirements.
Yet this doesn’t mean you need an IDP—there are other ways to unlock faster, safer development that come without the upfront investment and long-term maintenance requirements. For instance, you could automate more of your existing processes using CI/CD pipelines, or adopt new-generation AI agents (as we’ll discuss below). It’s sensible to explore these options first before committing to an all-star developer platform.
When You Likely Need One
IDPs are generally best suited to larger organizations that have the resources to create dedicated platform teams. Signs that you’ll benefit from building one include:
- Your onboarding processes are slow and complex.
- You’re experiencing issues caused by deployment inconsistencies.
- Compliance violations are occurring frequently.
- Your developers need multiple tools to achieve their tasks.
- Developer productivity is suffering due to long delays waiting for infrastructure access to be approved.
If you’re experiencing any of these symptoms, then launching a developer platform could be an effective solution. Each of these problems can be tackled by automating and standardizing your processes using an IDP.
When You Probably Don’t Need One
You may not need a developer platform if you’re not yet facing these issues, work with simpler software architectures, or find that your developers rarely have to interact with infrastructure resources. Focusing on other aspects of developer productivity and DevOps performance could offer a better ROI, such as by providing AI agents that let developers perform contextually relevant actions while they work. Let’s wrap up by taking a closer look at this opportunity.
The AI question: Exploring the future of developer platforms
As AI-powered workflows become more commonplace, the value of conventional developer platforms is changing. Compared with an IDP, adopting agentic AI tools requires little upfront investment, but offers similar developer-facing convenience. Agentic AI behaves like an intelligent platform that fits into existing developer workflows with minimal configuration.
With agentic AI, developers can access the resources they need using simplified natural language prompts. AIs can also efficiently automate workflows, generate new code on demand, and recommend the tool or process to use next based on recent codebase or infrastructure events.
As these capabilities become ever more mature, teams will often use AI agents to implement services previously built into IDPs. This model eliminates the need to painstakingly integrate different components when working with platforms such as Backstage and Port. Agents automatically know the context that connects different parts of your stack, enabling you to improve DevEx with less effort.
One platform that is adapting by embracing agentic AI is Quali Torque. Quali’s Torque platform includes a built-in AI Copilot that can write infrastructure code, investigate errors, and automatically optimize your cloud costs.
Torque lets operators work more autonomously by simply describing the resources they require in natural language, such as “Launch a new environment in the staging and development AWS clusters, with cost monitoring and budget caps enabled.”. Should a failure occur in this process, then Quali Torque’s Copilot can guide you straight to the problem with automated root cause analysis.
Implementing these features in a traditional IDP would require days or weeks of engineering, but Quali’s AI agent is ready to use as soon as you’ve connected it to your cloud accounts.
Conclusion
IDPs aren’t the only way to improve developer productivity and can be too big a commitment for smaller organizations. New generation AI tools can provide many of the benefits of developer platforms, if they have enough contextual awareness. AI-powered solutions let developers ask questions and run commands in natural language, without requiring platform teams to manually configure every workflow.
Ready to try an infrastructure operations platform that offers both IDP-like benefits and AI-native workflows? Quali Torque eliminates tradeoffs between control and ease of use, letting you accelerate infrastructure management at scale.