Different approaches for building an IDP
In a previous post, we discussed what an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) is and some drivers behind IDP initiatives.
If we go through our interactions with different organizations, we see teams embarking on the journey to build their IDPs mainly driven by the following requirements:
- They need to increase application deployment velocity
- Their development teams need self-service capabilities to operate their applications better
- Bring developer productivity up and allow them to focus on their applications rather than infrastructure
- Reduce the operational and support burden on the DevOps and/or Platform Engineering teams
- Allow DevOps and Platform Engineering teams to scale the environment without impacting the developer
While building an IDP may seem like an obvious choice and initiative, it is definitely not an easy task to accomplish. Building an IDP involves dealing with many moving components.
Your IDP has to integrate with your current stack across CI pipelines, monitoring, security, incident management tools, and more to be a successful.
Ultimately, you want to make sure you deliver a solution that developers will use, security will like, and reduce the burden on the DevOps or Platform Engineering team.
When going through this journey, we see a couple of different approaches, which we discuss in the video below:
