Look around, the best teams build Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs). An IDP is like Heroku but it’s built on top of the tech you already use. Never heard of it? Well it’s a trend. Last week I spoke with two great technologists about the rise of IDPs. Jason Warner, the CTO of Github explained the cause for building their own. Paolo Garri shared why they’ve built the one at Sport1 and if you recall Jan Löffler described their experience building their own IDP at Zalando.
I was especially hyped about the conversation with Jason from Github. We talked about why they built their own Internal Developer Platform, why you need one too and why this is a new category of tools that had to evolve. My key take-aways:
👂 There are pivotal moments in a team, such as adopting microservices, going multi-cloud or crossing a certain number of developers. Jason: “like having your first child, nothing will ever be the same again”.
👂 Teams that are building on unstructured scripts get slow because of key-person dependencies and maintenance. Jason: “if you slow down you die.”
👂 Serving internal developers matters as much as serving external companies. Developer experience is vital. And a good dev experience means that Dev and Ops doesn’t need to talk at all.
The last few weeks I also just sat down and spent more time writing down some of the more technical observations I had around what’s going wrong in DevOps today. I’ve been observing some of the fundamental flaws of Helm for a while so I jotted down my findings and possible architectural solutions in a post called “Your Helm Zoo will kill you”. It also led to a super interesting conversation on Reddit including some Helm contributors going nuts, awesome.
When I talked with Paolo Garri over at Sport1, it struck me how they drowned in scripts (I see this all over the place when I see the setups teams run) so it’s super relevant. I wrote this piece on “Tame your Zoo of Scripts” that gives hands-on advice on what you can do today.
If you want to learn how to scale your team alongside Kubernetes I’d recommend you have a look at this webinar we’re doing in cooperation with our friends at Polar Squad.
If you want to learn how to build your own Internal developer Platform, I’ll explain this in our Webinar in two weeks. If you’re still not convinced that Humanitec is the fastest way to build your own IDP, I suggest you do some Google search on the topic (LMGTFY)!
Thank you for being here with us!
Kaspar
