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Sathish Kumar
Sathish Kumar

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What is IDP and why we need it?

What is Internal Developer Platform(IDP)?

  • In simple words, it abstracts away the complexity of underlying infrastructure for the developers using self-service tools and technologies

  • Helps developers to focus on building the application by providing "Golden paths" to handle deployments/infrastructure provision or management through a portal

Why we need it or what it does?

  • Reduces the cognitive load: Abstracting away the underlying complexity like provisioning cloud resources, environments & CI/CD setup

  • Increases productivity: By leveraging IDP, developers can focus on building the application instead doing the operational tasks

  • Unified Experience: Central portal for software catalogs, documentation and accessing tools

How it is related to Platform Engineering

  • Core output of Platform Engineering, created to serve developers as customers of the IDP platform

  • Platform Engineering team responsible for designing & maintaining the IDP

  • Platform team continuously improve the IDP, based on the developer feedback

Summary:

Internal – IDPs are meant for internal use only.
Developer – Indicates the internal customer and the primary user, the application developer.
Platform – Characterizes the product type.

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