By 2027, it is projected that 80% of large organizations will adopt platform engineering to effectively scale their DevOps initiatives in hybrid cloud environments, a significant increase from less than 30% in 2023, according to Gartner
At the heart of platform engineering is the Internal Developer Platform (IDP) built by either the platform or Ops team to build golden paths and developer self-service. They improve developer experience, enhance developer productivity, reduce manual operations, and lower costs and maintenance overhead.
In this article, we’ll dive deep into
Introduction to an Internal Developer Platform (IDP)
Understanding the Core Components of an IDP
Step-by-Step Guide to Building an IDP
Benefits of a Robust Internal Developer Platform
Challenges in Implementing an IDP
Introduction to an Internal Developer Platform
An Internal Developer Platform (IDP) is a custom-built, comprehensive, self-service framework designed to streamline the entire software development life cycle within an organization. An IDP integrates many different tools and technologies providing developers with a unified environment in a way that lowers the cognitive load on the developers without abstracting away underlying context.
An IDP encompasses all tools and technologies either open-source or proprietary, as well as custom-developed tools:
Integrated Development Environment (IDE) Tools: Examples include Visual Studio Code, Eclipse, and Xcode.
Version Control Systems (VCS): These include GitHub and GitLab.
Continuous Integration (CI) Tools: For instance, CircleCI, GitHub Actions, and Bitbucket.
Container Registries: Including Docker and Harbor.
Platform Orchestrators: Like Facets, Humanitec, and Massdriver.
Developer Portals and Service Catalogs: Like Facets, Port, and Backstage.
Kubernetes Control Planes: Such as Gimlet and Shipa
GitOps Tools / Continuous Deployment Controllers: Such as ArgoCD and Jenkins.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Tools like Facets, Terraform, and Pulumi for managing infrastructure.
Databases and Storage Solutions: Like Azure SQL, MongoDB
DNS Management
Kubernetes Management Options
Cloud Providers
Additionally, various other tool categories contribute to the IDP ecosystem, including monitoring, security, and logging tools.
Facets.cloud is more than just an Internal Developer Platform (IDP); it encompasses a comprehensive ecosystem that integrates Application Sources, IDPs, and Infrastructure Resources. This holistic approach ensures streamlined management and automation across all aspects of cloud operations, enhancing productivity and reducing complexity.
IDPs enforce standardization by design, infrastructure, optimized workflows, and service level agreements thereby automating repetitive tasks like provisioning resources or environments for developers. They also set baseline templates for application configurations and manage permissions effectively.
IDPs seamlessly integrate which usually remains a git-push workflow while adding further automation placing the entire deployment process at the disposal of the developer. This enables them to request resources, spin up fully provisioned environments, roll back, deploy, and set deployment automation rules autonomously.
Understanding the Core Components of an IDP
As IDPs evolve from traditional ops models to DevOps, some key capabilities have emerged as core components of a robust platform.
Self-Service Infrastructure Provisioning
On-demand provisioning of infrastructure resources is essential for developer productivity. IDPs provide self-service access to computational resources, storage, networks, databases, and other assets required to build and run applications.
For example, an IDP could offer a web console allowing developers to select pre-configured virtual machines, container clusters, serverless environments, and databases. These environments are then automatically instantiated based on predefined templates and policies.
Tools like Facets help developers provision infrastructure autonomously and eliminate tickets and approval delays.
Unified Deployment and Orchestration
Standardizing deployments through containers and orchestrating them across shared and partially isolated environments enable rapid, reliable releases—thus improving the developer experience.
Technologies like Docker and Kubernetes provide portability and automation for deployment workflows that automatically streamline the processes.
Infrastructure-as-code like Terraform allows teams to define entire application stacks and environments as code for consistent provisioning. CI/CD pipelines automate the build, test, and promotion of code changes across dev, test, staging, and production environments.
Platform engineering tools can help orchestrate continuous delivery across infrastructure and applications with minimal changes to existing workflows.
Centralized Configuration Management
Managing application configurations and secrets—application settings, feature flags, access controls, and credentials—across environments is critical for streamlined deployments. IDPs address this need through:
Version-controlled configuration
All application and infrastructure configurations are stored in a source control system like Git or SVN for change tracking.
Single source of truth
The IDP syncs the latest approved configs from source control into runtime environments like Kubernetes. This establishes a single source of truth.
Drift detection
Continuously monitor for and alert on any unauthorized changes to configurations to avoid configuration and infrastructure drift across environments.
Secret management
Securely store API keys, database passwords, certificates, etc. in a secret vault. Automatically inject secrets into environments.
“Facets has brought in standardization across all aspects– how you build, deploy, monitor, and how you access and interpret metrics – all of these are defined consistently. Everyone speaks the same language and could easily comprehend their own and dependent services”—Piyush K, Chief Architect, Capillary Technologies.
Facets, Vault, and many other IDPs sync configurations from source control into runtime environments giving your dev teams access to all the required configurations under a single roof.
IDPs also help enforce configuration policies consistently helping all teams automatically stay on top of changes.
Automated CI/CD Pipelines
Automating continuous integration and delivery processes in a pipeline is necessary for safe, rapid releases. For instance, a developer's code commit to Git could trigger a Jenkins pipeline. Jenkins auto-builds a Docker image, runs integration tests, and security scans, and pushes the image to a registry if validated. Once that’s done, automatic deployments and testing are done across dev, staging, and production environments.
"Earlier the development teams were only worried about their code. Facets have created awareness for Developers—I can already see developers now aware of, How will my code be deployed. What kind of infrastructure does it need? What kind of alerting needs to be set up? What kind of auto-scaling is needed?"- Kadam, Co-Founder & CTO, Treebo.
Most IDPs help you with CI/CD automation by codifying reproducible CI/CD workflows but ensure that you pick one that’s extensible enough for your future workflow changes.
Monitoring and Logging
Being able to monitor and keep a log of the health, performance, availability, and usage of your workflows is critical, especially in production. IDPs like Facets can auto-collect metrics from a variety of applications and infrastructure and the metrics can be visualized in intuitive dashboards with minimal effort. The integration of monitoring and logging capabilities gives developers data and insights to debug issues and optimize systems proactively.
Security and Compliance Automation
Implementing security and compliance policies consistently across dynamic environments is challenging. IDPs help by codifying and automating controls for:
Infrastructure security: Secure baselines for servers, containers, databases, etc.
App security: SAST, DAST, secret scanning, runtime protection
Access control: Role-based access, least privilege principles
Compliance checks: Posture validation against standards like SOC2, ISO 27001, PCI DSS
Remediation: Auto-fixes for misconfigurations and violations
Tools like Facets, Chef InSpec, and a few others allow embedding compliance as code in CI/CD pipelines and integrating it seamlessly into development workflows.
Automated policy enforcement also creates predictable security outcomes and reduces the burden on developers by providing guardrails that secure environments by default.
Developer Experience using Collaboration Tools
Delivering software requires coordination between multiple teams—developers, SREs, security, UX designers, etc. IDPs focus on enabling seamless collaboration through:
ChatOps: Chatbots execute tasks like deployments, rollbacks, and more from within communication channels like Slack.
GitOps: Workflow automation based on Git events and pull requests.
Standards: Clear processes for code reviews, branching strategies, release planning, etc.
Shared Services: Common libraries, tools, and utilities that teams can build upon.
Self-Service Access: On-demand environments, infrastructure, and databases for testing and debugging.
This allows teams to sync work and resolve issues quickly without roadblocks. An effective IDP breaks down organizational silos and makes software delivery predictable, reliable, and efficient.
Platform Extensibility
A key aspect of future-proofing an IDP is extensibility—the ability to easily integrate new tools and technologies. An extensible IDP should provide:
Modular architecture: Components can be added or replaced as needed.
Easy APIs: Services and functions accessible via standard interfaces.
Loose coupling: Minimal interdependency between components.
Custom integrations: Options to build proprietary modules and extensions.
Open source libraries: Leverage and contribute to public repositories.
This enables teams to tailor the platform to their evolving requirements without excessive vendor lock-in or rebuild costs and the IDP can organically grow over time.
Step-by-Step Guide to Building an IDP
Building an IDP is a strategic initiative that requires thoughtful planning and execution. Below is a step-by-step guide to get you started. This guide walks you through the essential steps for building and optimizing your IDP, with a special focus on tools like Facets, which streamline platform engineering through automation, multi-cloud support, and developer self-service capabilities.
Step 1: Assess Your Current Infrastructure
Before diving headfirst into building an IDP, assessing your current infrastructure is a crucial first step. Conduct a thorough audit of your existing environment: the tools, processes, and bottlenecks. A proper audit will highlight what’s working and what isn’t, helping you define the goals for your IDP.
Key considerations:
Consider your existing tech stack and team size.
Understand your application's complexity and its impact on infrastructure requirements.
Identify areas where automation and streamlining will yield the most benefit.
Step 2: Choose the Right Platform Engineering Tools
Choosing the right platform engineering tools is critical to building an effective IDP. Focus on specific criteria that align with your organization's goals and developers' needs. Here’s a structured guide to your decision-making process.
Identify core requirements
Determine the core functionalities your IDP must provide, such as Application Configuration Management, Infrastructure Orchestration, Environment Management, Deployment Management, and Role-Based Access Control. This will help in creating a custom-made platform to address pain points in your development workflow
Evaluate Integration Capabilities
Ensure that the tools selected seamlessly integrate with your existing tech stack, including CI/CD pipelines, version control systems (like Git), and monitoring solutions (such as Prometheus or Grafana) to enhance operational efficiency. Specifically, look for tools that are compatible with the broader ecosystem of your IDP. This can include Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools like Terraform or Ansible for provisioning environments on demand
Assess Scalability and Performance
Choose tools that provide you with the balance you need between your organization’s current needs to that of the future needs. They should be able to accommodate increased workloads and user needs without compromising performance. Evaluate how each tool impacts key performance metrics, such as Deployment frequency, Lead time for changes (LTTC), Change failure rate (CFR), Mean time to recovery (MTTR), and Reliability.
Consider Cost and Licensing
Analyze the pricing structures to calculate the total cost of ownership including any hidden costs related to training and support for potential tools. Ensure the value proposition offered by the tool justifies its cost and that you derive a healthy ROI from the tool.
Focus on User Experience
Opt for tools with intuitive interfaces with a minimal learning curve for developers, encouraging adoption and reducing friction during onboarding. Evaluate the quality of documentation and customer support, which can significantly ease implementation and troubleshooting efforts.
Gather Feedback from Developers
Most importantly, involve the end users i.e. developers from the start to understand pain points and preferences. This will go a long way in prioritizing features and the subsequent adoption. Pilot the feature within a limited setup, get feedback, and then go for full-scale implementation. In addition to doing this one time during implementation, ensure a continuous feedback loop is set for iterative improvements based on user experience.
Facets’ no-code approach not only accelerates the setup process but also enhances developer productivity by minimizing the need for manual intervention in complex workflows. With automation capabilities for complex processes such as Kubernetes orchestration and infrastructure management, Facets drastically reduces operational overhead. Its pre-built solutions also support multi-cloud environments, simplifying the management of resources across platforms.
Step 3: Create Reusable Automation Blueprints
Blueprints offer a practical way to represent your architecture, serving as a plan for your entire product. This allows you to design all aspects of your product without launching any resources on the cloud. Blueprints offer several benefits such as
Consistency and Zero Drift
Blueprints ensure that all your environments follow the defined architecture unless explicitly overridden. You can always compare an environment against the blueprint defaults, maintaining consistency across deployments.
Default Configurations
Blueprints let you set default configurations. For example, if you set your production configuration as the default, you can launch a performance environment identical to production whenever needed.
Single Source of Truth
Blueprints act as a single source of truth for your infrastructure. They help you tag resources correctly for billing and cost tracking. Since blueprints capture everything needed to run an environment, including resource configurations, service discovery, and secrets, you can launch environments with a single click.
Efficient Resource Management
Blueprints help you manage resources by defining and tagging them correctly. This ensures your cloud infrastructure is organized and costs are tracked accurately.
With Facets, creating these blueprints becomes significantly easier, as it offers ready-to-use templates for handling common tasks like scaling Kubernetes clusters and managing infrastructure resources across different cloud providers.
Step 4: Empower Developers with Self-Service Capabilities
To effectively empower developers, your IDP should incorporate the following components:
Centralized Developer Portal
Acts as the primary interface for developers to discover and access resources.
Provides a software catalog listing available services, APIs, and tools.
Automation Framework
Automates repetitive tasks such as environment provisioning and application deployments.
Implements Infrastructure as Code (IaC) practices to ensure consistency.
Control Plane
Manages all resources, including applications and infrastructure, allowing developers to perform self-service actions like provisioning and terminating resources.
Service Catalog
A comprehensive listing of all available services that developers can use for their projects.
Facilitates easy discovery and utilization of existing resources.
Step 5: Integrate Multi-Cloud Support
Managing a multi-cloud environment within your Internal Developer Platform (IDP) requires a well-thought-out strategy to ensure smooth integration, consistent configurations, and efficient resource management across different cloud providers. Here's how to make it work seamlessly.
Define Your Multi-Cloud Strategy
Start by evaluating your business needs. Are you going multi-cloud for redundancy, compliance, cost savings, or to access unique services? Once you know your "why," choose cloud providers that align with your goals—AWS for its robust compute services, Azure for enterprise applications, or Google Cloud for AI and data analytics.
Centralized Management and Monitoring
Streamline your cloud operations by using a centralized control plane, like Rancher or OpenStack, to manage resources across multiple clouds. Implement monitoring tools that gather performance and cost data from all providers, giving you a clear view of what’s happening in real time.
Automation and Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
Simplify multi-cloud management with IaC tools like Terraform or Pulumi, which allow you to define and automate infrastructure consistently across different platforms. Set up CI/CD pipelines using tools like Jenkins or GitHub Actions to easily deploy applications across multiple clouds.
Service Catalog and API Management
Create a service catalog that lists available resources across all your cloud environments so developers can quickly find what they need. Use API management tools like Kong or Tyk to ensure seamless communication between services hosted on different clouds.
Security and Compliance
Establish unified security policies that apply across all cloud environments, particularly for identity and access management. Automate compliance checks to ensure that everything deployed across your multi-cloud setup meets regulatory requirements.
Networking Considerations
Ensure secure and reliable networking between cloud environments by using inter-cloud solutions like VPNs or dedicated interconnects. Implement load-balancing strategies to distribute traffic efficiently, boosting performance and availability across your cloud platforms.
Cost Management
Track and optimize spending across your clouds using cost management tools that give you insights into usage patterns. Set up budgeting processes for different teams or departments, so you can maintain financial control and accountability across your multi-cloud environment.
Do you know that Facets can help you save up to 20% of overall cloud costs with available rules? Book a demo with Facets now!
Facets simplifies this by offering built-in multi-cloud support, enabling seamless management across platforms like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. This gives your team flexibility in choosing the best cloud provider for specific tasks and allows you to distribute workloads more effectively.
Benefits of Using an IDP
Here are some significant ways IDPs improve developer productivity:
Increased velocity - IDPs accelerate release cycles by providing standardized build and deployment pipeline setups with greater reusability thereby augmenting developer productivity. These efficiencies add up to a significant increase in release velocity.
Reduced overhead - IDPs automate infrastructure provisioning, tool configuration, and other mundane tasks. A Stripe survey found developers waste 50% of their time on tasks instead of coding, which IDPs directly reduce.
Improved system reliability - IDPs standardize and templatise infrastructure setups, minimizing errors from ad-hoc configurations. Environments are consistent and more stable.
Enhanced collaboration - IDPs connect developers, ops engineers, QA, security, and other teams with built-in tools for communication and visibility, thus streamlining development.
Higher developer satisfaction - IDPs provide a consumer-grade, self-service developer experience that helps improve developer satisfaction as they can focus more on what they love most—code.
Faster innovation - IDPs enable developers to experiment more and build new capabilities faster by eliminating productivity bottlenecks. The velocity translates to tangible business outcomes.
5. Challenges in Implementing an IDP
Implementing an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) can greatly improve the efficiency and collaboration of software development teams, but it comes with its share of challenges. This guide highlights the main obstacles organizations may face during IDP implementation and offers strategies for overcoming them.
Migration Complexity
Moving to an IDP involves more than just transferring code and data—it often requires reshaping how software is built. For example, transitioning from a monolithic architecture to microservices requires meticulous planning to manage dependencies and configurations smoothly. Integrating legacy systems with modern IDP tools can also present challenges, as outdated CI/CD pipelines may not easily sync with new, cloud-native solutions. Organizations will need to rethink deployment strategies to ensure seamless integration.
Cultural Resistance
Developers may resist adopting an IDP due to fears of losing control over their workflows or tools. If the platform feels too restrictive, they may bypass it, causing fragmentation in workflows. Additionally, stakeholders might expect instant results, but transitioning to an IDP takes time, training, and adjustment, which can temporarily affect productivity. Managing these expectations and fostering developer buy-in is crucial for success.
Toolchain Integration
Bringing together various tools into the IDP can be tricky, especially when blending older software with newer platforms. Developers may encounter compatibility issues that lead to frustration. Striking a balance between enforcing standardization (for security and efficiency) and offering flexibility (to let developers use their preferred tools) is key for effective toolchain integration.
Scalability Challenges
As more teams use the IDP, bottlenecks can occur, delaying deployments and overwhelming infrastructure resources, especially if many teams deploy at once. Additionally, scalability issues within IDP tools themselves may hinder performance, causing disruptions across other services and affecting overall efficiency.
Security and Compliance
Ensuring unified security policies across multiple cloud environments and tools can be difficult. Organizations need to maintain strong access controls while also ensuring that the entire platform complies with regulatory requirements. Without automated compliance checks, there's a higher risk of non-compliance due to manual errors or oversight.
Training and Support
Adopting an IDP introduces new tools and workflows, requiring developers to undergo training. If this training is inadequate, productivity may suffer during the adjustment period. Continuous support is also necessary to help developers navigate the platform effectively—without it, frustration and resistance to using the IDP may arise.
Feedback Mechanisms
Creating tight feedback loops is essential for refining the IDP based on developer needs. Without regular input, organizations risk building features that don’t align with what users require, leading to dissatisfaction and missed opportunities for improvement.
By understanding these challenges and implementing the right strategies, organizations can ensure a smoother transition to an IDP, resulting in improved collaboration, efficiency, and software quality.
Conclusion
Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) have become essential for modern software development, offering a comprehensive approach to managing the entire software lifecycle—from code creation to deployment and beyond. By integrating self-service provisioning, standardized deployments, centralized configurations, and built-in security, IDPs enable organizations to streamline processes and boost developer productivity.
In today’s business landscape, where software is central to success, adopting an IDP is not merely a choice but a strategic necessity that can accelerate innovation and improve software quality. The advantages of implementing an IDP include faster release cycles, lower operational overhead, improved system reliability, and enhanced teamwork, all contributing to greater developer satisfaction.
Forward-thinking organizations understand that a well-designed IDP is more than just a tool; it is a strategic asset that yields long-term benefits. By tackling the complexities of cloud-native development and promoting collaboration among teams, IDPs create an environment where developers can concentrate on what truly matters—innovation.
“The future belongs to those who automate it”
Why choose Facets for your Internal Developer Platform?
Facets stands out as an ideal choice for organizations looking to implement a comprehensive Internal Developer Platform. Its no-code approach accelerates setup and enhances developer productivity by minimizing manual interventions in complex workflows.
With built-in automation capabilities for Kubernetes orchestration and multi-cloud support, Facets simplifies resource management across platforms like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. By providing a centralized developer portal and robust monitoring tools, Facets empowers teams to focus on innovation while ensuring consistent security and compliance across environments. Embrace Facets to elevate your development processes and drive meaningful business outcomes
Want to see Facets in action? Book a 1:1 demo today.
