Internal Developer Platform

Summary

Golden paths, paved roads, and self-service capabilities for teams to ship reliably.

What it is

An IDP productizes the platform: templates, automation, and curated experiences that reduce cognitive load and speed delivery.

Responsibilities

• Service templates and scaffolding
• Standardized CI/CD and environments
• Catalog and discoverability
• Guardrails, policies, and cost controls

Core capabilities

• Self-service provisioning and lifecycle ops
• Golden paths and docs in-context
• Scorecards and reliability baselines
• Feedback loops and platform telemetry

Delivery: DevOps & CI/CD

• Standard CI pipelines with unit/integration tests and artifacts
• Security & quality gates (SAST/DAST, dependency scan, coverage)
• Automated CD with promotion/approvals/rollback
• Progressive delivery: blue/green, canary, feature flags
• GitOps controllers and declarative environments
• Ephemeral preview environments and env config management

Runtime: Cloud Infrastructure & Orchestration

• Cluster lifecycle and capacity management
• Scheduling, autoscaling (HPA/VPA), and health management
• Service discovery, routing, ingress/egress and policies
• Storage classes/volumes and data durability
• Network policy, load balancing, multi-AZ/region topologies
• Service mesh integration and runtime policy control

Architecture patterns

• Backstage or custom portal
• Templates + workflows as code
• Platform APIs and API-first integration
• Inner-source and contribution model

Tech examples

• WSO2 Choreo
• Backstage
• Humanitec
• Port
• Internal
• Harness IDP

KPIs/SLIs

• Lead time for change (DORA)
• Deployment frequency and change failure rate (DORA)
• MTTR for incidents and rollbacks
• Pipeline success rate and duration
• Time to onboard and time-to-first PR
• Developer satisfaction (DevEx surveys)