Internal developer portals are launched to accelerate innovation
To meet customer needs and stay ahead of their competitors, organizations continue to invest in digital transformation to create new user experiences and drive operational efficiency. However, this has become more difficult at a time when rising costs are forcing organizations to reduce spending. As this trend continues into 2024, organizations will need to work leaner and deploy their resources further than ever.
Developers are feeling the heat
Software development teams are under particular pressure, as they need to accelerate digital transformation without an increased budget or additional headcount. To enable success, digital leaders urgently need to reduce efforts in development and delivery processes. This has led to a significant focus on platform engineering, providing developers with a set of reusable tools and components that they can use to create software with less manual effort. According to Gartner, 80% of large software engineering organizations will have platform engineering teams by 2026.
These teams take the lead in building an internal developer portal (IDP), often on top of Backstage, that enables self-service provisioning of pipelines, testing, and infrastructure without the hassle of building them out for each service or product. This has become an increasing burden for engineers as organizations increasingly adopt microservices, Kubernetes and multi-cloud architectures. These ecosystems create complexity, introduce more moving parts into the technology stack, increase the number of tools and platforms developers rely on to get code into production, and require them to master the configuration of multiple infrastructure types. As a result, the developer experience has deteriorated and it has become more time-consuming and complex to onboard new team members.
A portal to a better experience
An IDP overcomes these challenges and gives developers one central place to access the tools and capabilities they need to deploy existing and new code and manage all the services and components they are responsible for. Just as a bank’s customers don’t have to think about everything that happens in the middleware layer and on the back-end mainframe when they make a deposit, an IDP wraps a wrapper around the development infrastructure. This means developers can focus solely on writing and committing code, rather than having to worry about building staging environments and dealing with complex deployment processes. As a result, they can spend more time creating new features and less time writing scripts to get their code into production.
This approach also helps developers improve the quality and security of their services without spending a lot of extra time on testing. Through an IDP, as part of a modern software delivery platform, engineering teams can embed automated testing processes and best practices into the delivery pipeline to ensure that all new releases meet strict Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for performance and reliability and are free of vulnerabilities before they are delivered. they come into production. This helps increase developer happiness and team morale, as they can get code into production faster and with more confidence.
With fewer tools and processes to master, it also becomes easier to attract new team members because developers can capture, build, test, and promote code with less effort. As these benefits become more widely recognized, Gartner estimates that by 2025, 75% of organizations with platform teams will offer self-service developer portals to improve the developer experience and accelerate product innovation.
Getting developers on board
As displaced people have come to life over the past eighteen months, developers’ expectations for them have increased dramatically. Developers want a dynamic and fully self-service experience so they can quickly and easily find the tools and capabilities they need to deploy their code and move on to the next project. Platform engineering teams should therefore ensure that their IDP contains a catalog of services and documentation that exists within an organization. As developers look to leverage services beyond their immediate team, this catalog makes it easier for them to leverage existing capabilities without having to search extensively for help. This allows them to stay in the flow of their development project, without having to wait for another team to provide support.
An IDP should also enable the automation of simple workflows, such as setting up a new pre-production environment, and provide software templates that eliminate the need for developers to generate tickets for repeatable processes, such as running tests. These capabilities can be extended with scorecards that allow developers to measure the quality of their services against established KPIs so they can quickly identify performance issues or vulnerabilities.
Platform engineering teams must also keep in mind that developers often have deep-seated preferences for the tools and processes they are accustomed to. So it is important that an IDP integrates seamlessly with third-party solutions in the development toolchain. Organizations must also ensure security by ensuring developers only have access to the functionality and data they need to complete their work. IDPs should be embedded in role-based access control and centralized governance to ensure the platform engineering team remains in control and can provide oversight.
Laying a foundation for success
As organizations continue to invest in platform engineering, they will need a clear strategy for delivering an IDP that meets the needs of their developers now and in the future. Many have started building their own IDPs from the ground up, using DIY know-how. While they may have worked initially, these approaches do not scale in the long term. Furthermore, platform engineering teams risk undermining the efficiency gains they could achieve from the effort and costs associated with running, managing and hosting their own custom solution.
Instead, organizations should look to purpose-built, enterprise-level solutions that remove the burden of creating an IDP. This allows developers to focus on building and operating their software, rather than creating delivery pipelines, increasing their happiness and increasing productivity. Ultimately, this will help organizations become leaner while continuing to accelerate their digital transformation, laying the foundation for lasting competitive advantage.
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