Unlocking Developer Productivity: The Secret Weapon of Platform Engineering (IDPs)

What is the value you put on your software development team’s time? What does their productivity mean to the organization and the go-to-market plans you have announced to the market?

If software products drive the success of your business, it is imperative that you put a premium on developer productivity, quality and consistency of the builds, and the eventual timely delivery to your customers.

The advent of DevOps was supposed to bring developers and operational teams together to jointly deploy and run their applications. However, the reality was that in many companies implementation of DevOps simply resulted in more work getting shifted to the development organization. In addition, the proliferation of tools, increasing cloud adoption, multi-cloud strategy, container orchestration, and complex pipelines put a massive cognitive overload on developers which crushed their overall productivity. ?

What if the paradigm could be shifted and rethought to enable self-service for the developer? What if they can effortlessly consume infrastructure, configuration management, and other similar tasks without a lot of cognitive overload?

According to Microsoft, Platform engineering is a practice built up from DevOps principles that seeks to improve each development team’s security, compliance, costs, and time-to-business value through improved developer experiences and self-service within a secure, governed framework. It's both product-based mindset shift and a set of tools and systems to support it.

Thoughtful introduction of the Platform Engineering discipline and building the requisite tools like IDP can be the pathway to the much-needed developer productivity and experience repeatedly suggested by this article.

Platform engineering, and consequently IDP, have found varying levels of acceptance amongst companies.

• Mature, digitally native companies already have it and enjoy the ability to deploy code thousands of times a day. These companies have taken self-sufficiency, productivity, and experience seriously enough to minimize operational and cognitive overload by providing the required abstractions to their software development teams.
• A small set of companies have built the different elements that can eventually be pieced together to form a working IDP. Clear vision, product focus, and the determination to break through organizational hurdles are required to make it happen.
• The rest of the companies have the opportunity to take the leap into investing the time and resources into learning the values of Platform Engineering.

What is an Internal Developer Platform?

IDPs are developer focused platforms that allow developers to self-serve environments, deployments, rollbacks, monitoring, manage configuration etc. to allow developers to orchestrate an application through its lifecycle, thereby streamlining and enhancing the development process.

By consolidating the various tools and technologies required for the development lifecycle, IDPs enhance developer productivity, reduces friction with infra/ops teams, and as a consequence increases the competitive advantage of an organization.

An IDP is more than just a shiny abstraction of tools behind a shiny frontend. A lot of thought and product focused platform building coupled with cultural changes are required for it to become successful.

Benefits of an Internal Developer Platform (IDP)

A well-orchestrated IDP keeps on giving. Benefits abound. Here are a few that are noteworthy.

• Delivers significantly superior developer experience.
• Improves productivity and, consequently, time-to-market.
• Reduces cognitive overload allowing the developer to focus on things that matter.
• Avoid and/or reduce the dependency on allied teams while improving the consistency, reliability, and security of the applications.
• Increase ownership of the configuration, deployment, and rollback processes.
• Improve developer creativity by allowing them to experiment freely and without the delay and constraints enforced by other teams.

Key Features of an IDP

IDPs accelerate the continuous integration and delivery of code pipelines by helping automate builds, tests, deployments, rollbacks while reducing the likelihood of human error and accelerating the development process. Key features of an ID include –

• Resource Management and Scalability
• Self-service Templates for repetitive tasks
• Automation
• Application Configuration Management
• Environment Management

A well developed IDP provides all of these capabilities and more with a robust role-based access control system to manage resources safely and securely for the organization.

Gartner predicts that by 2026, 80% of software engineering organizations will establish platform teams as internal providers of reusable services, components, and tools for application delivery.

Platform Engineer and IDPs have been around for over five years. It is time companies realized the benefits of arming developers with tools and technologies that can be consumed in self-sufficient ways. Developer Experience, and consequently, the company’s go-to-market strategy is tightly coupled with it.