The 2020s are about simplification. We’ll all be cloud-native, time to figure this one out. Yes, there will be a bunch of serverless flavors coming in, we’ll treat those functions as nano-services, quite similar to micro-services from a tooling perspective. There will be more “low-code”, but I tend to think things are consolidating. The fundamental workflows, the motion will more or less be the same. With the expanding “history” of applications and digital offerings, comes also the problem of structuring and sorting out this mess. And this is where both Internal Developer Platforms and Service Catalogs come in, as my colleague Luca explains in this brilliant article on how to understand and use both together.
A Service Catalog (such as Backstage) is about searching for a service, template, or convention (a pane of glass if you want). An Internal Developer Platform is about orchestrating infrastructure and dealing with application configurations. Teams combining both functionalities will get a huge head start on their competition.
In a meetup with Puppet’s Nigel Kersten last week we were just discussing how it’s interesting to see that even smaller teams (fewer than 50 devs) are now implementing these things. And that is because developer self-service is what makes for a true “you built it, you run it” ownership-driven culture, no matter your size.
My colleagues asked me to point you at a couple of webinars coming up that you should definitely join:
- Manuel Pais will be talking about the difference between traditional and modern platforms
- Aaron Erickson will share insights on why they built an Internal Developer Platform at Salesforce
- Our CTO, Chris Stephenson, will give a product demo
As always, think PIG (platforming is great) and enjoy meeting with people again in person if your local COVID situation allows for it.
Cheers,
Kaspar
