Internal Developer Platform In Plain English

Pros and Cons of Using Internal Development Platform in the Cloud Computing World

Introduction

Internal Development Platform (IDP) as a brand new word in the DevOps and product development. In this article, I’m explaining:

• What exactly IDP is
• How to involve it in your organization
• An overview of the existing IDP platforms on the market, their pros, and cons
• An example of IDP Architecture based on the Azure Cloud

What is an internal developer platform?

As a software architect, I design the DevOps processes and spend much time selecting the DevOps toolset, building pipelines, and communicating with the DevOps team to implement some procedures for the development team. We can solve this with the internal development platform (IDP).

An internal developer platform(IDP) is an additional layer between development and DevOps teams. The main idea behind the IDP is to remove the dependency between DevOps and developers.

Let’s look at what functions and components you should include in the IDP. The IDP platform should provide the following:

• RBAC management
• Infrastructure management
• Configuration management
• Deployment management

Let’s have a look at what is the IDP from insights and how it is connected with DevOps tools and cloud providers.

IDP and DevOps

As seen in the previous example, IDPs are like frameworks built on top of DevOps tools, resources, and cloud providers. Some developer platforms may include an option to work with numerous DevOps tools and cloud providers, like in the diagram above. Other IDPs focused on specific ones.

The diagram below shows the example of the IDP components and how they combine DevOps tools and cloud providers.