What is an internal developer platform?

An internal developer platform (IDP) consists of a standardized set of self-service tools and technologies that developers need to create and deploy code. 

Red Hat Developer Hub is an enterprise-grade developer portal containing a supported and opinionated framework for building IDPs. It helps reduce friction and frustration for engineering teams, while boosting their productivity, and increasing their organizations competitive advantages.

By consolidating and simplifying elements of the development process, the basic objective of an IDP is to make a development team’s day-to-day work more manageable, efficient and collaborative.

Application developers are the primary users of an IDP, and platform engineers are responsible for initial configuration and maintenance. For platform engineers, an IDP can be thought of as an integrated product curated to provide developers with the tools they need to operationalize an application throughout its entire lifecycle.

Organizations with multiple development teams often struggle with competing priorities, managing a diverse set of tools and technologies, and challenges to establishing best practices while adhering to security and compliance standards. 

By adopting an IDP, organizations can help solve several challenges faced by development teams, including:

Standardization: Provides a standardized set of tools and services for all teams, reducing the risk of inconsistencies and errors.

Productivity: Helps automate setting up and managing development environments, configuring build pipelines, and deploying applications, allowing developers to focus on writing code and delivering features faster.

Collaboration: Provides a shared platform for collaboration between development teams and other parts of the organization, such as operations and security teams, to work together, improving communication and collaboration.

On-boarding and self-service: Reduces the time it takes for new developers to become productive using the appropriate tools, providing them with a better experience and decreasing the time it takes for them to ramp up and start creating value.

Scalability: Provides a scalable platform that can grow with the organization, allowing new teams to onboard quickly and ensuring all teams have access to the same tools and services.

Governance: Establishes a framework that allows organizations flexibility and adherence to best practices which comply with security and compliance requirements--monitor and manage development environments effectively.

DevOps is an approach to culture, automation, and platform design that’s intended to promote a more efficient working relationship between development and operations teams, leading to faster and more frequent delivery of software applications and associated features. 

Providing your team with an IDP can be a critical part of enabling and maintaining a DevOps culture.

OpenShift, when combined with Red Hat Developer Hub, provides platform engineering teams with the tools they need to effectively build and manage internal developer platforms (IDP) and create the project templates, documentation, and workflows needed to build “golden paths.” 

Here are a few of the ways we make this possible:

Secure and compliant solutions: Red Hat Developer Hub is a full suite of verified and curated tools and components needed for operations teams to support developers–all in a centralized, consistent location. This results in increased productivity, fewer obstacles, and simplified governance with self-service and guardrails.

Leading development experience: Red Hat passes along expertise and experience to customers from our ecosystem of partners and open source projects.

Self-management and maintenance: Red Hat provides access to a common suite of developer tools that makes it easier and more productive for teams to build cloud-native services and applications.

Support for critical bug fixes and new features: Red Hat Developer Hub offers a centralized place for teams to access the latest versions of functionality, system architecture, and application documentation when and where they need it.

Easier Integration: New tools and services (via Red Hat Plug-ins for Backstage) are pre-integrated. This means that extensibility and scalability are enabled for a single, consistent experience that ties together infrastructure tooling, resources, standards, owners, contributors, and administrators.