To keep up with rising customer expectations and stay ahead of the curve, businesses are continuing to invest in digital transformation to innovate user experiences and enhance operational efficiency. Amid escalating costs and tightened budgets, this endeavour has grown more challenging. As this persists into the second half of the year, organisations need to operate more efficiently, maximising their resources like never before.
Developers under pressure
Software development teams are facing significant demand from the business, as they strive to speed up digital transformation without additional budget or extra staffing resources. To enable success, digital leaders must urgently reduce toil in the development and delivery processes. This has triggered a significant focus on platform engineering, which gives developers a set of reusable tools and components they can use to create software with less manual effort. According to Gartner, 80% of large software engineering organisations will have established platform engineering teams by 2026.
To relieve the pressure, software engineers are taking the lead on building an Internal Developer Portal (IDP) for their organisation, as seen by some of the world’s most innovative companies like Spotify, and founders of the CNCF project Backstage. Many organisations’ IDPs are built around that same Backstage foundation. This allows them to self-serve provisioning pipelines, testing and infrastructure, without having to build these out for each service or product. This has become even more important as organisations have increased their use of microservices, Kubernetes, and multi-cloud architectures.
Without an IDP, such ecosystems introduce more moving pieces to the tech stack. These ecosystems add to 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, developer experience has worsened, and it has become more time-consuming and complex to onboard new team members.
Internal developer portals are taking off
With an IDP, organisations can overcome these problems and lighten the burden for their developers, helping them access the tools and capabilities they need to deploy code, and manage all the services and components they are responsible for – from a single interface. In the same way that a bank’s customers don’t need to think about everything going on in the technology stack when they check their balance in a mobile app, an IDP puts a wrapper around development infrastructure. This means developers can focus on their ideas rather than building staging environments and dealing with deployment processes. What’s more, they can spend more time creating new features, and less time jumping through all the hoops to get their code into production.
As a further benefit, an IDP approach also helps developers to improve the quality and security of their services, without spending significant extra time on testing. With an IDP embedded within their modern software delivery platform, engineering teams can integrate automated testing processes and best practices into the delivery pipeline to ensure all new releases meet strict key performance indicators (KPIs) for performance and reliability. That makes it infinitely easier to ensure code releases are free from vulnerabilities before they enter production.
As a result, developer happiness and morale gets a boost, as teams can get code into production faster and with greater confidence.
Having fewer tools and processes to master also makes it easier to onboard new team members, as developers can commit, build, test, and promote code with knowledge and experience of the organisation’s unique systems. As these benefits become more widely recognised, Gartner estimates that by 2025, 75% of organisations with platform teams will provide self-service developer portals to improve developer experience and accelerate product innovation.
Meeting developer expectations
IDPs have gained traction over the past 18 months, and developers’ expectations of them have increased exponentially too.
They 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 onto the next project. Platform engineering teams therefore need to ensure their IDP includes a catalogue of services and documentation that is available for their developers to use. As developers reach outside their immediate team to use other services, this catalogue-based approach makes it easier for them to consume existing capabilities without an extensive search for help. This further enhances their productivity by removing potential roadblocks while developers wait for support.
Developers should also be empowered to automate simple workflows through their IDP, such as creating a new staging environment. It’s possible to provide frameworks that remove the need for developers to manually trigger repeatable processes, like running tests. IT leaders can enhance these capabilities using scorecards. These allow developers to measure the quality of their services against established KPIs, enabling them to quickly identify any performance issues or vulnerabilities.
Those building their organisation’s IDP also need to account for the fact that developers often have entrenched preferences for the tools and processes that they are used to. As such, it’s important for an IDP to seamlessly integrate with the most popular third-party solutions in the development toolchain. Platform engineers must also maintain security by ensuring that developers only have access to the functionality and data that they need to complete their work. To enable this, IDPs should be ingrained with role-based access control and centralised governance capabilities to ensure the organisation can maintain oversight.
Empowering developers for a sustainable, successful future
As investment in IDPs remains a priority for organisations, they will need a clear strategy for delivering a platform that caters to the needs of their developers now and in the future. Many have started by building their own IDP from the ground up, using DIY know-how. Whilst these approaches may have worked to begin with, they aren’t scalable as a long-term solution. Furthermore, platform engineering teams could undermine the efficiency gains they stood to gain due to the effort and costs involved in operating, managing, and hosting their own custom-built IDP.
Rather than relying on improvised solutions, organisations should explore purpose-built, enterprise grade offerings that streamline the process for creating and maintaining an IDP. Developers can then focus on building and operating their software, alleviating the need for them to construct delivery pipelines – consequently increasing their morale and boosting productivity.
This will help organisations to run leaner whilst maintaining momentum in their digital transformation efforts, thereby establishing a robust foundation for a sustainable competitive advantage.
- Digital Strategy
