An internal developer platform (IDP) is a self-service layer built by an organization that standardizes infrastructure, tools, and workflows into a product-like experience for that organization’s internal developers. Its goal is to abstract away operational complexity, enforce guardrails, and give developers “golden paths” — predefined workflows or sets of best practices—to build and deploy software quickly and safely. IDPs are the flagship product of so-called platform engineering teams, serving as the structural glue between dev, ops, and business goals.
As cloud computing, containerization, devops, and microservice architectures have established themselves as the building blocks for modern application development, IDPs have emerged as a simple way to manage those resources for internal software developer teams. At many elite engineering organizations — think Google, Netflix, and Amazon— IDPs ease the operations load on their devops teams, while abstracting away unnecessary decisions for software developers, and other companies and organizations have also moved to take advantage of the concept. A good IDP should relieve developers of the burden of making infrastructure decisions, enable self-service environment builds, integrate with existing continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) and deployment processes, and assign role-based access controls, all without a developer ever having to learn YAML.
The idea might remind you of a developer portal (e.g., catalogs, Backstage-style UIs). But a portal is just a piece of the larger picture; a platform also embeds automations, enforcement, APIs, and self-service