Question of the week, can you buy an Internal Developer Platform? No, you can not! An out-of-the-box IDP is called PaaS. If that is what you want (and there are a TON of good reasons for PaaS), you should look at Heroku, Netlify, Render and friends!
So if you cannot buy an Internal Developer Platform, what is it? I’m getting more precise in my answer as I’m spending more time with fellow Platform Engineers (that phenomenon is called schismogenesis to nerd out a little on psychology). This is my current view:
An Internal Developer Platform is the sum of all the tech and tools that developers use to build software. In well functioning organizations, a team of platform engineers stitches these tools into golden paths that reduce the cognitive load for the individual contributor and drive standardization by design.
Straightforward, but I’m sure also quite unsatisfying. Because this means two things: every IDP looks different (the platform of a bank will for sure look different to the hipster scale up engineering team in Austin) and you already have a platform. Because if you don’t build your platform, the platform builds you. Treat your freaking platform as a product (thank you Manuel!).
This does not mean that there aren’t best practices or that you cannot use blueprints to build your Internal Developer Platforms. I’ll do a lot more of these sample implementations and one of the next frontiers I really want to focus down on is platform as code samples you can test out of the box.
Hmm, if that’s the summary, what is Humanitec? Easy - Humanitec is the Platform Orchestrator that lets you glue together your delivery toolchain and build a dynamic Internal Developer Platform. A Platform Orchestrator sits at the core of a dynamic Internal Developer Platform. It enables dynamic configuration management and developer self-service, allowing for low cognitive load on engineers. It drives standardization by design and has a vastly positive impact on the productivity and health of engineering organizations.
I often hear people sigh and say “so many tools”. Honestly, deal with it. We’re building wildly complex systems that scale across millions of users. Can you imagine how many thousands of tools and suppliers any normal car-factory lane employs? It’s your job to structure these tools into golden paths, into a lane that keeps your colleagues creative, productive and does not restrict them the slightest bit.
It’s a fun endeavor and an incredibly exciting time to be a Platform Engineer. Embrace this and go for gold! I’m here to help if you need me.
All the best,
Kaspar
