What is an Internal Developer Platform?
An Internal Developer Platform (IDP) is a self-service toolset that provides both developers and the DevOps and other teams who support them with everything they need to build, deploy, and manage applications in a more streamlined and efficient way.
Unlike traditional infrastructure management, where operations teams handle all provisioning, orchestration, scaling, and maintenance of environments supporting the software development lifecycle (SDLC), internal developer platforms are built and maintained by platform engineering teams to accelerate developer productivity by automating manual tasks, promoting reusability, and eliminating complexity in the developer experience.
Platform engineering teams design IDPs to offer developers a centralized platform for accessing essential resources like cloud environments, databases, CI/CD pipelines, and monitoring tools. By integrating infrastructure as code (IaC), container orchestration (like Kubernetes), and automation tools, IDPs help reduce friction between development and operations.
Often, platform engineering teams design internal developer platforms to integrate with an internal developer portal that serves as the front-end developer experience from which all resources can be accessed.
This increases development velocity, improves collaboration between DevOps teams, and reduces the risk of misconfigurations.
Benefits of Internal Developer Platforms
Developers aren’t often skilled in infrastructure operations; however, they do frequently need to provision new app environments and manage deployments.
Moreover, operations teams must ensure that infrastructure access remains safe and compliant; for example, it’s inappropriate to directly hand developers the keys to cloud accounts.
An IDP allows you to solve these problems by unifying and abstracting your infrastructure resources.
Instead of devs having direct access to infrastructure, they can then use simple self-service actions to interact with environments or view a deployment’s logs. Because they’re not exposed to the complexity of how those actions are implemented, very little effort is required to apply changes—instead of requiring multiple config files, IaC tools, and cloud account logins, a single press of a button will do the trick.
Learn More About Platform Engineering
IDPs also address the security and compliance challenges that occur when developers have direct infrastructure access, providing a platform that acts as a gateway to infrastructure resources that limits developer access to the components that the platform exposes. This reduces risk and ensures that the operations team retains overall control of infrastructure activity.
Overall, an IDP empowers developers by giving them control over the resources they need for key development work, while easing the burden on DevOps by maintaining guardrails to ensure security, reliability, scalability, and cost efficiency for the resources they consume.
For developers, this includes:
- Self-service access to provision cloud infrastructure, launch cloud environments, and execute day-2 actions on those environments
- Simplified developer experience that eliminates the need for expertise in cloud platforms just to run cloud resources or perform day-2 actions on those resources
- Role-based access controls to reduce security risk by eliminating the need to enter cloud account credentials or other secrets and denying the ability for developers to configure cloud resources independently
- Automated operations, such as the termination of environments after a pre-set runtime, to reduce the risk of human error from self-service
For DevOps teams, this includes:
- AI tools and other automation to streamline the creation of resources that are distributed to devs via the IDP, including IaC modules and reusable templates for cloud environments
- Reusability to eliminate redundant work such as orchestrating cloud environments or performing routing day-2 tasks
- Integration with existing toolsets such as source control repositories, CI/CD platforms, Internal Developer Portals, and others.
- Enforcement of cloud governance to deny activity that violates IT and DevOps standards, such as unapproved resources, configurations, or cloud cost thresholds.
- Visibility to help DevOps teams understand how resources are being used, including visibility into the performance of resources that developers rely on.
IDPs grant developers autonomy throughout the software delivery process by providing access to self-service golden paths. They allow devs to perform the infrastructure interactions they require while staying within acceptable security and compliance guardrails.
Implementing an Internal Developer Platform
Depending on the tech stack, implementing an IDP for infrastructure can be challenging, as it requires multiple tools and services to be integrated, demanding significant time, expense, and skills.
Nonetheless, successfully adopting an infrastructure platform lets you manage your resources much more efficiently, enabling long-term productivity and throughput improvements.
IDPs are often created and maintained by platform teams to give developers access to the tools and processes they need to achieve their tasks. The platform engineer is tasked with finding wasy to automate, centralize, and standardize the DevOps workflow, enabling devs to focus on more meaningful work.
In the context of infrastructure operations, IDPs should be oriented around self-service operations that make it possible to create resources, provision environments, deploy apps, and apply config changes—all without requiring devs to submit a ticket to the ops team.
Internal Developer Platform vs. Developer Portal: What’s the Difference?
Those looking to optimize developer productivity may consider the concepts of both an IDP and an internal developer portal. It’s key to understand the fundamental differences.
An internal developer portal provides the developer experience that enables developers to access and operate the resources they need, many of which were created by the platform team or DevOps team. The portal is the interface that eliminates the need for developers to deal with the complexities of how the platform is implemented.
Learn more: Understanding the Differences Between Internal Developers Platforms vs Internal Developer Portals
Meanwhile, the internal developer platform provides support to the broader software development ecosystem. This includes automation and scalability for DevOps teams to scale the services intended for developers more easily, such as the orchestration, security, and standardization of the resources that developers access via the internal developer portal.
Meanwhile, the internal developer platform provides visibility for the platform team to understand how those resources are being used to identify potential obstacles to developer productivity.
Some internal developer platforms may include developer portal capabilities. Learn more about how Quali Torque supports platform engineering, DevOps, and development teams with this brief demo.
Key Components of an Internal Developer Platform
Although an infrastructure platform should be tailored to your team’s requirements, most IDPs share a set of fundamental components.
Including the following key capabilities will make sure your platform provides robust support for developers working with infrastructure operations.
Centralized/Orchestrated Control Plane
The platform should feature a robust control plane that centralizes the management of your infrastructure resources. Look for strong automation options, such as generative AI features capable of producing templates and config files for new environments.
Declarative IaC Support
IaC underpins modern infrastructure management workflows, so it’s vital that this is fully supported within your platform. Devs should be able to declare the resources they need, such as a cloud server and an S3 storage bucket, and then have the platform automatically create them.
Self-Service Developer Experience, Within Policy-Driven Guardrails
Platforms should be designed to support safe self-service access by all engineers, including those who may be unfamiliar with the infrastructure tools in use. The platform team should also have policy-based controls to log developer activity and prevent access to unauthorized resources. While building your platform, be sure to collect input from your development team on the experience that would be the most valuable to them.
Intuitive Portal That Exposes the Platform’s Service Catalog
Developer portals provide an accessible interface to platform features. Devs can use the portal to discover all available actions and services, often with contextually relevant suggestions. Because the portal exists independently of the platform’s internals, the platform team can modify how services are implemented without affecting developer workflows.
Direct Integrations with Cloud Providers, CI/CD Services, and IaC Tools
Platforms must neatly integrate with the rest of your DevOps stack—particularly, the cloud platforms, CI/CD services, and IaC tools you use. Native connections allow you to easily configure new deployments without needing to master the intricacies of connecting individual services through their public APIs.
Comprehensive Observability and Debugging Support
Platform success depends on visibility into utilization, performance, and errors, which can be gained, for example, by using tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, and Logstash to continually monitor service metrics and logs. You can also connect your live environments for developers to efficiently detect and debug production problems all in one place.
Ability to Test Infrastructure Changes and Rollback Failures
Platforms should facilitate dry runs of infrastructure changes so errors and regressions are detected before they affect production. This way, when problems do occur, the possibility of instant rollback options—accessible to every developer—minimizes recovery time.
Automatic Environment Drift Detection
Environment drift is a common cause of infrastructure incidents. Platforms that periodically check your resources and automatically resolve detected drift help ensure operations remain stable.
Automated Day-2 Actions for Live Environments
Self-service day-2 actions enable devs to execute prebuilt workflows on live environments so they can work more autonomously—without having to manually apply configurations or step through complex processes. Platforms also facilitate efficient management of workflow-driven schedules and trigger actions such as automatically running a vulnerability scan when new containers start.
Support for an Internal Developer Portal, If Needed
These features should be tightly integrated to form a holistic platform. This can be harder than it sounds, however, so it’s best to take a structured approach to platform implementation, providing plenty of opportunities to monitor performance and iterate upon changes.