The Hidden Benefits of Internal Developer Platforms
In the modern, highly competitive business world, organizations must target every opportunity to get ahead of their competition. In many cases, this means taking a revenue-driven approach, where everything is directed toward driving profits, such as developing new products.
While this approach can be highly beneficial, it often leaves blind spots when projects don’t bring a direct financial benefit.
Since internal developer platforms (IDPs) don’t bring obvious financial benefits, they are regularly overlooked by board-level executives. However, IDPs bring significant internal benefits, notably vastly improving the developer experience and revolutionizing development pipelines. This ultimately helps to reduce time to market and, in turn, generate huge potential value.
There are three clear wins businesses can gain from implementing an IDP:
1. Reducing the Human Load of Development
Many businesses operate a ticketing system for development requests. In this model, developers submit a ticket with their IT department to request changes, and then the IT department flags this with an infrastructure team or equivalent. This team then takes responsibility for deploying that change for the development teams. While this process is linear and easily followed, it involves multiple teams, significantly hampering the pace of development.
Unable to respond to their customers’ needs, organizations find that their competitive advantage is being eroded by more-agile competitors.
Having these development cycles exist within an IDP can significantly streamline the approach. By using developer platforms such as Backstage, templates can be implemented and people can “self-serve” development. They can access their project templates, deploy to GitHub and combine with a range of recommendations already provided. This helps to ensure that any applications or products that are designed conform to a set range of standards that are easily applicable and enforceable across the entire organization.
The provision of an IDP provides significant benefits, removing entire teams from the development pipeline so that developers can focus on their work and bring value to customers.
2. Providing Wider Access to Knowledge
Many organizations, particularly once they reach a certain size, depend heavily on tribal knowledge held by a small number of people. This presents a significant challenge when these individuals are unavailable or leave. It also creates difficulties when new hires join a team, as they often become dependent on their more knowledgeable colleagues, which can significantly increase the existing staff’s workload and limit the spread of knowledge.
IDPs help open up these information silos by providing self-service capabilities for developers trying to access documentation. This documentation also sits in a centralized “library,” meaning that it is easily accessible and not controlled by a single person.
Having this information easily accessible rapidly accelerates onboarding processes and improves the experience for new team members who are able to access all of the information they need from a single source of truth.
By streamlining information storage into a single platform and making this platform available across the organization, data becomes democratized. Alongside improving access to documentation and onboarding processes, this empowers developers to make the most of self-service capabilities, encouraging organizational innovation.
3. Driving Work at Scale
IDPs are also a valuable tool when organizations begin to operate at scale. This is because they encourage developers to work with predefined templates, which helps to maintain standards. Additionally, organizations can use scorecards and initiatives to further ensure high-quality work is produced.
Scorecards allow the “maturity” of each service to be tracked against specific requirements, and can even be used to benchmark the performance of software and determine if it is ready to be released. Initiatives, on the other hand, allow certain standards to be pushed out to teams, which enables accurate assessment of their performance.
Maintaining high developer standards ensures that code is never shipped broken, and applications and products being built from standardized templates make them easier to iterate from and repair. This significantly accelerates development cycles and results in fewer developer hours being spent repairing broken applications and products.
Along with the improvements to developer workflows, IDPs allow for requests to be centralized in a single platform. This allows developers to focus on carrying out higher-value work, such as actually repairing broken applications or tools. The automation of these time-consuming processes allows organizations to scale their operations management and incident response workflows and lets developers focus on bringing value to their organization.
People, Processes, Technology: 3 Pillars of Positive Change
A common perception of new technology is that it will bring improvement simply by being introduced. But this is far from the case. Of course, new technology can bring benefits — for example, IDPs smooth the communication process, allowing for operations management to be automated — but they do not change the way organizations operate by themselves.
To drive meaningful change, technological upgrades must align with the way your organization works and be supported by the people who will use the technology.
When organizations start using IDPs, they are typically trying to address a specific problem. This can be a need for visibility on projects or a desire to reduce silos. Alternatively, an organization could be aiming to enable self-service capabilities.
Given the number of reasons organizations may adopt IDPs, they must always start by directly addressing the problem they want to solve and communicate the ROI of resolving this challenge to their organization.
This process provides significant impetus for the cultural change that is often required to make IDPs successful. While it is likely this process will have to be repeated as organizations shift their development processes to IDPs, each iteration provides useful data, allowing for organizations to adapt their strategy as they increasingly incorporate IDPs into their workflows.
