What is an internal developer platform?

An internal developer platform (IDP) is an integrated set of tools, services, and infrastructure that DevOps teams use to streamline, automate, and optimize the software development process. Such platforms offer self-service capabilities, enabling a cloud-native approach. For this reason, teams create platforms that are specifically tailored to the unique needs, skillsets, and standards of an organization. Internal developer platforms make recurring tasks—such as spinning up fully provisioned application environments and resources, changing configurations, and rollback—easier with self-service templates for application configurations and enforced compliance and quality standards.

IDPs accelerate continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines by providing DevOps teams with the means to address key challenges related to efficiency, automation, and resource management. They also automate builds, tests, deployments, and other routine activities. Automating these routine tasks reduces the likelihood of human error while speeding up the development life cycle. With a streamlined workflow and unified set of tools and services, developers can focus more on writing code and less on managing complex infrastructure.

IDPs provide the ability to provision and scale infrastructure resources, including databases, storage, and compute resources, as needed. Whether it's handling an increasing number of developers, larger codebases, or growing infrastructure needs, a well-implemented IDP helps DevOps teams optimize resource utilization, adapt to changes, and improve overall efficiency.

Self-service templates are essential components of an IDP, as they promote DevOps best practices while empowering engineers to build, deploy, and maintain software with minimal friction and overhead. Such templates typically follow modern architectural design, such as microservices.

IDPs offer collaboration tools and features that facilitate communication and collaboration among development teams. Such tools can include integrated chat systems, code review tools, and other collaborative features that enhance team coordination.

IDPs incorporate security measures and compliance checks within their framework. These protocols help ensure that security considerations are addressed from the very beginning of the development life cycle, reducing the risk of vulnerabilities and compliance issues.

IDPs are easy to use and foster productivity and innovation within development teams. They allow developers to focus on building features and solving business problems rather than managing infrastructure and tooling complexities.

An IDP should incorporate automation into its capabilities, as this will further enhance developer productivity and streamline key processes, such as infrastructure scaling, configurations, and pipeline management.