Internal Developer Platforms or IDPs are here to accelerate businesses’ software development lifecycles and simplify their operations by increasing collaboration. Besides the technical and cultural advantages, IDPs represent many benefits on the business side, as well.
Internal Developer Platforms simplify the use of tools only specialists were able to manage. This is a huge milestone in the life of teams working under DevOps, since it opened the gate for self-service interactions of non-specialists with highly technical tools.
As it turned out, abstractions were only the beginning for Developer Platforms. Integrating internal developer platforms were the real game changer that brought services under the same hood to make a convenient alternative to using terminals and multiple browser tabs. As GitLab’s blog post explained, the DevOps Platform era brought every stage of the DevOps lifecycle to one place. For this reason, if using an IDP is out of your scope because it’s too expensive or just not your thing, you’re missing out on game changer tools. Here’s why.
DevOps is a multi-disciplinary methodology, so it only makes sense to bring every aspect of it to one interface. Why would any team pick to interact with multiple tools individually on a deep technical level instead of managing all of them at one interface?
By nature, DevOps strives to accelerate software development lifecycle. The most expedient way to do so is to bring everything as close and connected to each other as possible.
But this approach brings another challenge. How will teams not step on each other’s toes in such a complex environment? By automating communication.
The cultural aspect of DevOps is often overlooked, that’s why the methodology is hard to adopt. Ways of collaboration and communication should be altered to fit the technical changes adoption brings. Lucky enough, technology can help with that in a lot of ways.
In many cases, we imagine collaboration as constantly keeping in touch with each other. Instead, it’s when teams only communicate when necessary. Like designing and planning what to do or when something needs to be fixed by others. For example, it’s a lot simpler to leave meaningful commit messages and generate a changelog based on them, than making one manually.
Even chat notifications can make communication more efficient. It’s one less step to complete a task when the IDP notifies others instead of you. And then there’s ChatOps that allows teams to interact with their infrastructure via chat messages. Other integrations allow teams to automate ticket creation on Jira, for example.
The ready-made solutions support collaboration in another way, as well. They allow teams to save time.
Sure, creating a whole new platform will hit a huge hole on your budget. You don’t have to make it from scratch, though.
There are many internal developer platforms out there that provide slightly different functionality. Some are specialized to Kubernetes or certain stages of the software development lifecycle, others deliver access to a broader range of technologies or steps within the SDLC. The common trait of these is that they don’t cost much compared to the value they bring to your organization, especially in the case of small to middle-sized teams looking for ways to scale their business.
Another significant advantage of IDPs to your business is that they’re useful to avoid vendor lock-ins. So if you decide to switch from AWS to GCP for whatever reason, you can just do that and the internal developer platform will stay there to keep on delivering value to you on top of your infrastructure.
This blogpost was written by the team of dyrector.io. dyrector.io is an open-source continuous delivery & deployment platform with version management.
Find the project on GitHub.
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