Humanitec and Compass: Key ingredients for platform success
Internal developer portals vs Platform Orchestrator
There’s a common misunderstanding that Internal Developer Portals and Platform Orchestrators are mutually exclusive. This couldn’t be further from the truth 👉 they are extremely complimentary and powerful companions when building your enterprise-grade Internal Developer Platform.
What’s a portal?
Internal developer portals let you define catalogs for all your services, resources, K8s, making your services easily discoverable and reusable. They provide UIs to supports developer self-service actions and are easily extensible, e.g. through a Platform Orchestrator.
What’s a Platform Orchestrator?
A Platform Orchestrator is the core configuration engine at the hear of your Internal Developer Platform. It lets you generate app and infra config files dynamically, with every new deployment. This drives standardization across all your teams and workflows, reducing Ops overhead and lead time.
How they work together
Top performing engineering organizations use a combination of developer portals and Platform Orchestrator to build enterprise-grade IDPs. The Platform Orchestrator is the core configuration engine, managing both app and infra config files, as well as security policies and RBAC. The portal is the intuitive UI developers use to interact with the IDP and underlying Platform Orchestrator.
